The behaviour you want is the way Excel is supposed to behave.

What happens if you only enter one word smaller than the Col width? Does
Excel add a blank line too?

Suppose you have this problem in the cell A10
Enter =CLEAN(A10) in A11
Do you get the same problem in A11 too or does it go away?

"Arun" wrote:

I have a notes column with the wrap text format on. I find that when I have
a line of text that reaches 2-3 characters from the end of the cell, Excel
expands the row and adds a blank line below it. However, there are no
characters on this line so I have a bunch of entries with an extra line of
space below them. I could just go through and manually shorten the width of
these lines, but it will take me all day and the minute I select all the
lines and autosize I will be back where I started.

Is there any way to get Excel to only expand the width when there is
actually a word or character to carry over?