Traditional Ways to Adjust Column Widths (Manually) In this example, Excel's default column width isn't wide enough to show all the text in column A.

How to Convert Excel to Text & Set Column Width. Each Microsoft Excel worksheet is broken up into cells. Each cell is part of a column.

Change the default width for all columns in a worksheet by clicking the worksheet's tab at the bottom Excel and returning to the menu that displays the formatting options as described previously.