Like majority of smartphone users, Excel users (know how to) use only a little portion of functionalities provided by the tool, even though we pay the full price for the tool…

Fill Justify (on the editing group of the Home Tab) is another mysterious tool in Excel that, when discovered, will make you not only fall in love with it; and also feel justified of your investment in Excel.

Just in case the above picture is not clear enough, here’s the content in A12:A16

• A12 – Well, pie is not for charting, it is for eating.  Let’s eat one slice of the pie.
• A13 – OK. You can write whatever comments you want.  BUT don’t cross the line beyond column D.
• A14 – And you are not supposed to merge cells as it will alter the row height which make the table on the right look ugly.
• A15 – What? Why don’t you tell me earlier? Do you know how much time it takes me to convert these four lines into different lines within the boundary of Column D?
• A16 – Well, I know! It takes about 5 seconds with 3 clicks. Why complain?

Am I serious? Of course.

Click 1 – Select the range A12:D16

Click 2 – HOME –> Fill (on Editing group) –> Justify

Click 3 – click OK on the message box prompted

• Done! Now you can  enjoy your pie + coffee. 🙂

Extra:

The result spreads the texts all over the destination area A12:D25.   If I now select the range A12:L25 and repeat the Fill Justify, I will get the result below:

Let’s experiment it on your own!

Limitation:

• A single cell cannot hold more than 255 characters; all words fallen on 255th characters and beyond will be trimmed
• If you have part of a text string formatted, e.g. red font, it will be gone
• The result is not “Justify” as you expect to see in WORD or the “Justify” in horizontal alignment.  Put it in other words, “Fill Justify” will fill all the contents on the left of the selected range (in our example A12:A16) to fit into the width of the range selected (in our example column A:D).  However it does not give you a result that is horizontally justified in a cell.
• Note: It will replace content in the cells required for the expansion.  Please make sure you have nothing in the destination area.

Final note: I am not encouraging you to use Excel as a word processing tool.   But in case you need Excel to act like a word processing tool, do it smartly.  😛