How do I change the spacing between lines in Excel 2010?

HansV is incorrect.

Within a cell, text line spacing often becomes larger than normal.  To fix this:

• right click just one affected cell (if you select more than one cell the following may not work as Excel will assume you want the mean setting for all selected cells and this may make it impossible to correct the problem
• Click: Format Cells
• In the Alignment Tab:
• Very often the Vertical setting is set to: Distributed
• Change Distributed (tiny down arrow button, black on grey) to something else - usually Center or Bottom (Bottom is the Excel default style)
• Click: Wrap Text check box (Tick in box)
• Click: Okay

This should fix most problems of this kind.  Usually you can double-click the Format (Paintbrush) icon and paste the settings onto all affected cells to correct them in a few seconds but look out for cells that may have different formats (like numbers).

Another way to solve text format problems is to cut the text out, paste it into a Notebook window, then cut it from Notebook and paste back into your Office document.  This strips off all paragraph and font settings. In Office 2010 there is now a right-click 'paste text only' option which is designed to do the same thing - but doesn't always work as cleanly as using Notepad in my experience.

However, in this specific case, the Notebook / Plain Text trick doesn't work as the settings are applied to the Cell not the text.

As HansV says: Spacing between text in adjacent cells is best adjusted using Column width or Row height adjustment - though you can also adjust this in some cases using the text indent feature:

• right click the cell where you want more or less space
• Click: Format Cells
• In the Alignment Tab:
• Change the Horizontal setting to either Left (Indent) or Right (Indent)
• Adjust the font point number in the Indent setting (tiny up and down arrow buttons, black on grey)
• Click: Okay

As you can obviously see from the above the Excel Cell Indent Text feature has some limitations - you can only adjust the text left or right (not both, and not above or below) and if you choose right the text is justified to the right of the cell which may mean you have to change a bunch of other cells to make the style consistent.

I hope that helps someone because it bugged me for ages.

I had the problem with increasing the spacing of lines in a single merged cell. Just playing around I found that pressing the Alt key then Enter did the trick for me. However I couldn't adjust how big the space was.

Hi all. There is only one way to this. Copy the text box in word. Change the line spacing and copy back to excel. It works!!!

• Change the layout to Page Layout (status bar).
• Home tab > Cells group > Format > Row Height
• Enter: 1 in (see figure)

Don't be so rude by saying it's a no brainer, everyone has to learn