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Merging cells in Excel can enhance the appearance of your workbook by creating visually appealing and streamlined spreadsheets that enhance data. Thankfully, Excel makes merging and splitting cells easy.
How to Merge Cells in Excel
On top of making a sheet’s layout look clean, combining cells can also help group related data. That way, you don’t have to stretch cells to show more information. This is useful when creating headers or long input fields (in forms).
To merge cells in Excel, select all the cells you want to merge—verify they’re adjacent. Then go to theHometab, and click theMerge and Centerbutton in theAlignmentgroup.
This will merge the selected cells but only keep the top-left value and center it. The rest of the values will be discarded. With a little bit ofExcel formatting, you may make the merged cells more obvious, especially if they are something like a heading or title.
You will see other merging options if you click the down arrow next to theMerge and Centerbutton.Merge Acrossmerges cells in the rows you selected and keeps the left value of each row.Merge Cellsmerges all selected cells and keeps the top-left value only, but it does not center it.
No matter what option you pick, there will be some data loss. Be sure to copy it to other cells or make a backup of the workbook in case you need it later.
How to Split Merged Cells in Excel
Sometimes, merged cells can interfere with some of Excel’s important features. For instance,working with Excel formulascan be difficult since many of them don’t work correctly with merged cells. Merged cells can also make the spreadsheet look inconsistent or cause problems when importing and exporting data.
To split the cells, start by selecting the merged cells on the sheet. Next, navigate to theAlignmentgroup in the ribbon of theHometab. Click thedown arrownext to theMerge and Centerbutton and selectUnmerge Cells.
Merging cells is often confused withcombining cells in Excel. Merging creates one cell by joining multiple adjacent cells (data loss is inevitable), while combining cells uses a formula to display data from different cells in one without data loss. Knowing the difference can save you a lot of frustration.
