Justify should do something like that, but it doesn't seem to work for me.

would it be possible to do this with times?

For example:

if time in third cell > 2:00pm?

Thanks again,

yes but it depends on how you have entered/formatted the third cell

if it is done as text and using 24 hour naming then if(third cell >"1400",first cell,"") works
if it is done as number and using 24 hour naming then if(third cell>1400,first cell,"") works (note no "" around the criteria)
if it is done as time and no date is entered then Excel defaults to 0/1/1900 date and 2pm is 14/24 so if(third cell>(14/24),first cell,"") works
if it is done as time and date is entered, and assuming you dont care about the day then if((third cell - int(third cell))>(14/24),first cell,"") works

Justify only works on (a) cells with word wrap enabled, and (b) not on the last line. If you only have one line, it's not justified.
The first column is left-aligned, and the second is justified.

I think you mean left-aligned, which is what General defaults to for text, but in any case those were exactly the problems I ran into when I tried to use Justify to make this happen. The only thing I can suggest is that, if this is a one-time deal and the text to be stretched out won't change, experiment with spaces between the letters to see if that might look OK. Caution: if the spreadsheet might be used on other computers that could have different versions of the fonts or other system-level differences, the results of this sort of hard formatting can look weird.

The connection at NRT was incredibly smooth today and I ended up with some extra time waiting for my flight. Here's one way to justify the text:

1. Enter "H a p p y sesquipedalianthology" into the cell. There is one space between each letter of the text you want to justify, another one after it. The last part can be any string that's too long to fit into one cell width. If "Happy" with a space between each letter is too big, double-click the cell to activate in-cell editing and set the spaces to a smaller point size.

2. Format the cell to justify horizontally, to align at the top vertically, and to wrap.

3. The row will become deep enough to show all the text, including the junk word. Grab it by the row number at the left and squeeze it back up so only the row you want shows.

Let us know if it works for you!

Can I ask another.

I have some substantial Excel sheets with a lot of aircraft data on them. The person who put them together only put the aircraft serial number (one of the columns) against the first line for such, any additional lines (from none to say 20 of them) and the serial number column is just blank.

This is fine for just looking at the info, but if you want to sort the sheet on one of the other data columns to bring common things together, the serial number reference is then lost.

So, can anyone suggets a formula which says "if the cell is blank, then make it the value of the cell above, if that has something in it". Probably best to add an extra column to do this.

If I understand the question, you have:
And you want:
Insert a new column A. Make a1 = B1. Make a2 = '=IF(B2="",A1,B2)'. Copy A2 and paste into the rest of column a. Either hide B, or copy column a, do a paste special-> values into a new column, and delete a and b.

Murphy, thank you very much, you are correct in your supposition, a bit busy at the moment, will give it a shot later.

Murphy, thanks for that, works fine, I just never worked out the syntax of the IF statements before, have been able to do some others now

Another question for everybody.

I am Windows 2002. My cells are format Text, with Wrap Text enabled. I can enter up to 255 characters of text in a cell, anything beyond that and the whole cell just shows all ###### although when selected the full cell contents are correctly shown in the formula bar.

But I read the Excel spec is a cell limit of 32,768 characters, of which the first 1,024 characters are displayed in the cell. Any reason for the shortfall I am getting ?

Which version of OFfice are you running

And if you plan on going to 2007 - dont waste too much time driving yourself nuts now - major changes to Excelb