How to Merge Cells in Excel? 3 Easy Ways

(Note: This guide on how to merge cells in Excel is suitable for all Excel versions including Office 365)

When working in Excel, you might have to deal with a lot of data. The data can either be manually populated or can either be downloaded or exported from external databases. When exporting or downloading any workbook or spreadsheet, the large data might contain different sections which can be improperly aligned or oriented. 

Some cells, especially those containing larger data, might take up the place of another couple of cells. In such a case, there might be a need for you to merge cells. In this article, I will tell you 3 ways and conditions to merge cells in Excel.

You’ll Learn:

• Why Merge Cells in Excel?
• How to Merge Cells in Excel?
  • Using the Merge & Center Option
  • Using Keyboard Shortcuts
  • Using Format Cells
• How to Merge Two or More Cells with Different Values
• Workaround to Merge the Cells

Watch our video on how to merge cells in Excel

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Why Merge Cells in Excel?

Before we learn how to merge cells in Excel, let us see what merging is and why we merge cells in Excel.

The layout of Excel consists of cells. Every cell contains a name and every data in Excel is entered in the cell. The data can either be a text, string, character, number, or special characters. 

Merge is a function in Excel where you can combine two or more cells to form a large single cell. 

Consider an example where you have to enter a string or a long text. When you enter them into a single cell, Excel makes it seem like the text is populating over different cells. But, only one cell (A1) holds the value. And, when you want to edit the text, you can only edit them in cell A1. 

Also, when any data is entered in any nearby cells, the contents of the former cell are shortened.

Though this might look good when the data is small, the orientation and alignment of the text get complicated as the data gets larger. This is true, especially in the case of Excel tables or PivotTables.

Merging cells help in clearing the nearby blocks and help showcase the particular cell as a whole block of text. Merging cells greatly helps in improving the readability of the sheet. It also helps in improving the overall texture and appearance of the workbook and provides emphasis on specific places like titles and headings. 

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How to Merge Cells in Excel?

When you enter a text in Excel, it appears across multiple columns and cells. Sometimes, they might not be properly oriented or aligned. Now, let us see how to merge cells in Excel with the same example.

Using the Merge & Center Option

You can easily merge cells in Excel using the Merge & Center option. 

To merge the cells, first, select the cells you want to merge. In this case, we want to merge the cells A1, B1, and C1. 

After selecting the cells, navigate to Home. Under the Alignment Column, select Merge & Center. You can either select the option directly or click on the dropdown and select any merging option to merge the cells.

There are 4 options in the Merge dropdown.

• Merge & Center: Merges the content of the cell into one large cell and aligns the content in the center.
• Merge Across: This option merges the cells in the same row but maintains the same alignment.
• Merge Cells: This option just merges the selected cells.
• Unmerge Cells: This option separates all the merged cells.

Once you merge the cells, you can see that the partitions that separate the cells have disappeared and the cells A1, B1, and C1 are combined. However, you can see that the cells B1 and C1 have disappeared, and only A1 remains. This is one of the drawbacks of merging the cells.

In case you have to merge the whole row, only the cell in which you house the value will be available and the rest would disappear.

Using Keyboard Shortcuts

Excel provides a lot of shortcut keys for various operations to help perform them easily and effectively. To merge cells, Excel has a combination of shortcut keys called hotkeys.

To merge cells using the keyboard shortcuts, first, select the cells by holding the Shift key and using the arrow keys to select the adjacent cells.

Now, hold the Alt key and press H. This opens the hotkeys layout which shows the specific keys corresponding to specific operations. 

Press M. This shows up a list of options from the Merge dropdown. Press any of the keys (C, A, M, U) to merge the cells in a specific format. 

This merges the separate cells into one single cell.

Using Format Cells

Another way to merge cells is by using the Format Cells option.

Select the cells you want to merge and right-click on them.

Select the Format Cells option. Or, you can use the keyboard shortcut key Ctrl+1.

This opens up a Format Cells dialog box. Click on the Alignment tab. Under the Text Control section, check the checkbox for Merge Cells and click OK. 

This merges all the selected cells. 

How to Merge Two or More Cells with Different Values

We saw how to merge cells into a single cell without any values populating the nearby cells. But if you had to merge two cells with separate values, what would you do?

Consider another example where you have to merge two cells that contain the first name and last name into a single cell.

The best option would be to choose the Merge & Center option. So, you would select the cells and click on Merge & Center.

Excel only keeps the data in the first cell (or the data in the top-left of the selected cells) and deletes the data in the rest of the cells.  

To reconfirm, Excel throws up a warning popup saying “Merging Cells only keeps the upper-left value and deletes all the other values”. Once you confirm it, click OK.

Workaround to Merge the Cells

You can see when you merge cells with neighboring values, Excel only considers the upper-left value while merging and deletes any other values in the existing cells. This cannot be the case every time.

When you want to merge cells without deleting or losing any value, you can choose other methods like concatenation, or copy and paste the values into other cells.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Closing Thoughts

Sometimes, merging cells can lead to inconsistency of values or discrepancies when sorting data. However, merging cells greatly helps in improving readability. The text that was unevenly formatted or improperly aligned in the sheet or table can be properly merged and emphasized.

In this article, we saw how to merge cells in Excel in 3 easy ways. Additionally, we also saw what would happen if we merge two or more cells with values. 

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Simon Sez IT has been teaching Excel and other business software for over ten years. For a low, monthly fee you can get access to 100+ IT training courses. 

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!