How to Change Row Height in Google Sheets (Quick & Easy)

Sumit
Last updated July 5, 2020

There are many cases when you may want to change the row height in Google Sheets (in order to make cells bigger and accommodate more data).

Whether you want to increase or decrease the row height, the steps would remain the same.

In this tutorial, I will show you various ways to do this. All these are super quick and easy ways, and the method you choose will depend on how your data is laid out.

All the method mentioned here to change the height of rows will also work when you want to change the width of the columns.

So let’s get started.

Table of Contents

Change Row Height with a Mouse Click and Drag

If you want to change the height of one row or a few adjacent rows, this is a quick way of doing this.

Suppose you have a data set as shown below and you want to increase the height of the second row.

Below are the steps to do this:

Place the cursor in below the rows for which you want to change the height (as shown in the image below).
Click the left button on the mouse
Hold the left mouse button and drag it down
Leave the button when you have achieved the required height

In this example, I have selected just one row, but you can also do the same with multiple rows. when you select multiple rows, no matter what their current height is, they all will have the same height once you’re done.

Auto-fit Row Height

One of the major reason you may want to resize the row height is when you have more text in the cell (which is on the second or third line in the same cell) and it’s not visible.

By increasing the row height, you will make the entire text visible.

But how do you know how much to increase the row size? If there only a couple of rows, you can consider doing this manually. But if there are hundreds, you can use the two methods shown in this section.

Autofit using Double-Click (Shortcut)

Suppose you have the data set below and you want to autofit the row height – which is to increase it just enough to accommodate text in all rows.

Below are the steps to auto-fit row height with a simple double click:

Select the rows for which you want to auto-fit the row height
Bring your cursor to the bottom edge of any of the selected rows (note that the cursor will change to a double-pointed arrow)
Double-click (left mouse button).

The above steps would auto-fit the height of all the selected rows.

Note that this doesn’t make all the rows of the same size. It changes the row height to fit the content in it (so that nothing is hidden).

Also, this would reduce the row height in case there is more space and the content needs less.

Fit to Size Using Dialog Box

You can also auto-fit the row height using the inbuilt dialog box functionality in Google Sheets.

Below are the steps to autofit row size in Google Sheets:

Select all the rows for which you want to adjust the row height
Right-click on any of the selected rows
Click the ‘Resize rows’ option
In the Resize rows dialog box, select the ‘Fit to data’ option
Click OK

The above steps would resize the row height based on the content in it. This may lead to Google Sheets increasing/decreasing the row height based on the content in the cells.

Also read: How to Autofit Column Width in Google Sheets

Resize the Row by Specifying the Height (in Pixels)

In some cases, you may want to make the row height consistent.

This is often the case when you have more content in the cells but you don’t want to make it all visible. Instead, you want to have some of it visible and make the row height consistent.

This can be done by specifying the row height in pixels (the default row height on my system is 21 pixels)

Below are the steps to set the height of the rows in Google Sheets: