Excel width in characters is wrong

[Guest]

The excel help states:
"The width of cells is displayed in characters and pixels rather than in
inches. When you drag the boundary of a column heading to adjust the width of
a column on the worksheet, a ScreenTip displays the width in characters and
shows pixels in parentheses."
A capital 'M' is the standard typographical width of a character. To get 10
'M's to appear in a column that is 10 wide I have to drop down to 4 point
type. Somehow that doesn't seem to be right.
Shouldn't Excel calculate based on the type size in the selected cell when I
grab the column width handle to change it?

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[Rob Bovey]

Excel defines "character width" as the width of the zero character in
the font used for the Normal style. An unformatted cell in a column of width
10 should fit exactly ten zeros.

--
Rob Bovey, Excel MVP
Application Professionals
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