Google Sheets Column Width Bug

google sheets

In a Google spreadsheet when I change the column width to 25 I noticed it looked very narrow. So I saved it as an .xlsx and then opened it in Excel. There it shows a column width of less than 3 as I suspected. That is a tiny column width.

Having done a little testing, here is the equivalence table I get:

Google spreadsheets col width    |    Excel col width    |  ratio
20                                    2.22                  9.01
30                                    3.67                  8.17
40                                    5.11                  7.83
50                                    6.56                  7.62

What on Earth is going on?

Best Answer

Bear in mind that Google Sheets use pixels to set the column width instead of "points of scale" used by Excel.

NOTE: I used Jing to measure a column with. You could do the same by using any tool to measure a screen area.

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