Microsoft Excel Quick Tip - Merging Cells on a Spreadsheet

There is going to come a time when you are using Excel to merge a number of cells together. This is usually done for appearance purposes. A good example would be, let's say on one row you have every month of the year, on the row above that you can label the year. By merging all twelve cells above the months into one large cell you can center and bold the year to let everyone know those months pertain to that specific year. Merging comes in very handy when you start putting borders around cells also.

Here are the steps to achieve this process:

Type in a year in cell A1, then on row 2 type the months January through May in each of their own cells. For example, January would go in A2, February would go in B2, March in C2 and so on.

The next step you want to do is click on cell A1 where your year is, then holding down the shift key, click on the cell E1. This will highlight the cells we want to merge. You can highlight as many cell as you want, however we are choosing A1 through E1 for this example.

You then want to make sure you can see the formatting toolbar. This is important because on this toolbar is the merge button we will need to press in order to merge the cells.

To view this toolbar, click the "view" menu option located at the top of the screen, on the sub-menu item that appears click on "toolbars". On the next sub-menu appears if there is no check mark next to "formatting", then click the word "formatting". This will display the formatting toolbar. If there is a check next to it, then you are already displaying this particular toolbar.

Now that you have your formatting toolbar displayed, look for the button that looks like a lower case "a" with arrows on each side of it. On the formatting toolbar it usually is located between the right justified button and the dollar sign button.

The cells that you highlighted earlier should still be highlighted. If they are not go back and repeat that step. If they are go ahead and click the merge button. You will see that the highlighted cells have now merged into one large cell and have centered the data, in this case the year.

You now know how to merge cells in rows. You can also merge column cells. This is done the same exact way as rows, except you do it vertically as opposed to horizontally.

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