How To Change Column Width in Google Sheets

Jamie Read more August 1, 2021

Fitting enough information into a single cell is incredibly important when it comes to understanding what the cell is trying to tell us. The data can get compressed or cut off within a column, so you may need to change the column width. Luckily, Google Sheets makes it easy.

Changing column width is just one of the ways to format data within Google Sheets. It is useful for making data fit into the cell and for making the dimensions of any given table fit into a design or page.

Change Column Width in Google Sheets

You have a couple options when changing column width in Google Sheets. You can widen the column or make it more narrow. There are different ways of doing each of those.

Manually Widen Column Width

The easiest way to get a table just so is to manually set your column width.

Open your Google Sheet and select the column you want to edit.
Click the line on the right side column header. The mouse cursor should change into a double arrow.
Drag the line until the column is wide enough for your needs and let go of the mouse.

Manually Narrow Column Width

As you would expect, to make the column narrower, you just do the opposite of the above.

Open your Google Sheet and select the column you want to edit.
Click the line on the right of the column header. The mouse cursor will change into a double arrow.
Drag the line until the column is narrow enough for the data to fit and let go of the mouse.

You can manipulate column width incrementally until it is exactly right for what you need.

Automatically widen column width

If you are just looking to fit the data within the cells to the correct width so they can be read clearly, you can do that much faster than dragging the column width.

Open your Google Sheet and select the column you want to edit.
Hover over the line on the right side column header. The mouse cursor will change into a double arrow.
Double click the line and it will automatically scale to fit the widest cell content.

This method is a fast way to ensure cell content is displayed correctly and that the width fits the content. The downside is that if you have a single cell that contains a lot of data, Google Sheets will change all columns to fit that single cell. This works best of all data is of a similar size or length.

How to Edit the Width of Multiple Columns at One Time

Some situations may call for multiple columns of data to all be formatted in a similar way. In these cases, editing each column one at a time would be tedious. To edit the width of multiple columns at once, follow these steps: