In today’s post we would take you through merging cells in excel. What’s the use of merging cells you may ask. Well, it is most useful for presentation purposes. For example, you may want to indicate a single header for multiple columns or rows in your spreadsheet
Our example for today shows a summary of some key income statement metrics of a company for the month of June.
We have three headers on the third row that show the actual performance, budget and variance between these two. But remember, these three column headers represent performance for the month of June only. This implies that the header on cell D2 should extend till column F.
How do we extend this? Easy, just follow the steps below:
Merge Cells in Excel
Step 1: Highlight from cell D2 to the other adjacent (contiguous) cells which in our example are cells E2 and F2
Step 2: Navigate to the home tab, then the Alignment group and click on the Merge & Centre dropdown and select from the options available.
Step 3: In our example, we would prefer the June heading to be placed at the center of the 3 columns, so we would select Merge & Center once again.
Result: Our June heading is now displayed at the center across the 3 columns
Unmerge Cells in Excel
We would be following on from our example above. To unmerge cells in excel, please follow these easy steps:
Step 1: Locate the merged cells and select. In our example, we would select cells D2:F2 by clicking on June – 20X2
Step 2: Repeat the process of navigating to the drop down of Merge & Center:
Step 3: Select the last option in the dropdown which is Unmerge Cells
Result: Now we are back to where we started, however you can see that cells E2 and F2 still retain D2’s formatting