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Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool for storing information in an organized manner. It’s a wizard at automating formulas, keeping records, and listing things in any of your personal preferences.
Yet it’s also easy to forget how to complete simple tasks.
Today we are going to show you how to merge cells: a smart way to format your data in a normal table and create a larger cell.
What Is Merging A Cell?
When you merge a cell, you take the contents of multiple cells and combine them into one large cell.
Merge Cells are used for many reasons, but one of the most common uses is for grouping a collection of cells together to create a more organized spreadsheet.
For example, if you had two different amounts in cells B2 and C2, merging these would allow us to see both numbers together without having to create a formula or write an equation in our cell.
How To Merge A Cell
The easiest and most efficient way to merge cells is done by the following:
- Navigate to the home tab at the top of the page. In this menu look for the ‘Merge & Center’ option.
- Under this tab, you will have four options in a drop-down menu that offer four different ways that you can merge cells.
- You can also unmerge cells this way as well just in case you make a mistake or no longer want to merge cells.
We are now going to go through each option individually.
Merge & Center
This option is ideal for merging cells that are labeled as a title for a table, as they will select all of the cells above your columns and rows that have headings, and will center the word.
For example, if we take the table below and highlight the title ‘Best Golf Courses’ from Cell B2 to D2. This will center the wording ‘Best Golf Courses’ in the middle of the table.
Now all three cells which were previously single cells are joined into one large cell.
Merge Across
This option is best used for making large rows out of many cells and is usually selected if you need longer horizontal cells for writing in. Row cells can be used for all sorts of items; even numbers and data points.
Simply select all of the rows that you would like to merge across, select the adjacent cells and pick this option. This will create a single long cell.
Merge Cells
This is similar to the Merge & Center option, however instead of centering the information between cells, it will only merge the cell from the very first cell you have selected.
For example, let’s take the example from Merge & Center and our ‘Best Of Golf Course’ list. Before the wording from cell B2 to D2 would have been centered in the middle of these cells.
However, with the Merge Cells option, it would now be one long cell and the wording would be located in cell B2.
Unmerge Cells
The final option is to unmerge cells, and as the name suggests, is for undoing any cell merging that you have already completed.
All you will need to do is select the cells that you would like to unmerge, and Excel will take care of the rest.
Let’s use our ‘Best Golf Course’ example one last time. We’ve merged them to the center but we now want to undo this. Simply select B2 to D2 and click unmerge cells.
The large cell will now be unmerged and B2 to D2 will now be a single cell once again.
Final Thoughts
Being able to organize your work in Excel doesn’t need to be complicated, and we hope you understood how to effectively merge and unmerge merged cells into separate cells.
If so, you now have another skill in your Excel tool kit of tricks and hacks to help keep your data in the layout you prefer!
