If you enter a long bit of text into a cell in Microsoft's Excel the text flows out of the cell over the top of the adjacent cells. This doesn't happen by default in Google Spreadsheet - it flows under the adjacent cells.
Is there a way to make Google Spreadsheet behave like Excel in this way?
(This is nothing to do with wrapping or re-sizing cells.)
Seems to do what you want by default (maybe because New Google Sheets?). You say (This is nothing to do with wrapping or re-sizing cells.) yet it does seem to be a matter of wrapping:
I think A1 is what you require. But as with Excel, the text in A2 is truncated where there is content in B2. A3 may be what you are describing as undesirable, achieved here with clicking the icon shown on the extreme right of the image.
I've just had a similar problem, and found that if cells are merged, it prevents the text from overflowing. So in the example above, if cells A1 and B1 are merged, the text that is now in "AB1" will no longer overflow into C1. I hope this helps other beginners.
You need to change the cell formatting to overflow. Select menu option:- Format / text wrapping / overflow
