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Say I had a workbook, and I wanted to make sure that all columns are readable; how would I determine the width the column needs to be from a cell's text, to then change the width of the column?

13steinj
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  • Sadly, as noted by @Charlie Clark, the bestFit attribute is not that helpful and there is no method provided within the library to do this. There are [some answers here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39529662/python-automatically-adjust-width-of-an-excel-files-columns) for manual workarounds. – bigsee Dec 13 '18 at 15:11

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You can't really do this accurately: column widths are calculated using the typeface installed on the computer system with some padding. So you can only work with a best guess.

You can set the bestFit attribute for a column but this often doesn't do what you expect.

From the specification § 18.3.1.13:

'Best fit' is set to true under these conditions:

  • The column width has never been manually set by the user, AND
  • The column width is not the default width
  • 'Best fit' means that when numbers are typed into a cell contained in a 'best fit' column, the column width should automatically resize to display the number.
Charlie Clark
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    Can you provide a few lines of code to demonstrate? Does the variable width issue go away with a fixed width typeface? – flywire May 03 '18 at 12:55
  • @flywire check out the answers [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39529662/python-automatically-adjust-width-of-an-excel-files-columns) if you haven't already... – bigsee Dec 13 '18 at 15:13