And when I go back to displaying formula results, my column width is now wider than it was. When I change the column width I also change the ColumnWidth. I need to increase the column width even more, but that creates another problem. It’s the longer formulas where I need to ensure consistency. If I have a 20 character formula, I’m probably not going to use Ctrl+` to check it out. The percent of times that Excel makes the column wide enough to show me what I want to see is 0%. I’m not sure what exactly is changing here, but that’s not really the point of this post. That is, the ColumnWidth property is still the same even though you can see more characters than before. When you do that, Excel helpfully increases the column width to show you more of the formula.Įxcel increases the column width, but it doesn’t increase the ColumnWidth. To display formulas in Excel, as opposed to displaying the formula results, you press the Ctrl+` key combination (that’s an accent grave and it’s to the left of the 1 on most US keyboards).