How to Use Merge Cells Feature and Its Usability

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the merge cells feature and its usability in excel completely. You sometimes need this feature to process and show data in your excel worksheet in a better way.

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What is the Merge Cells Feature?

The merge cells definition is an excel feature you can use to merge two or more cells that are close together. The merging process will produce one combined cell where you can put your data.

You can access this feature in the Home tab of your excel. Usually, excel shows this feature with the name “Merge & Center” (you can choose a normal merge cell from the dropdown of this merge & center menu if you want). If you click on this merge & center, then excel will combine your cell and center the content in the resulting cell.

To know more precisely about this menu location, see the screenshot below.

Merge Cells Usability

Generally, this merge cells feature in excel has some usefulness, which are:

• Organize the cells and data in your worksheet per your preference
• Group some specific data into one combined cell
• Highlight particular data

You can get all those benefits when you combine cells in your worksheet. Of course, this also depends on your original objective when you need to use this merge cells feature.

Steps to Use Merge Cells

The following will explain in detail the steps to use the merge cells feature in excel. As you can see later, using this feature is quite easy, moreover if you have got used to use it.

1. Highlight all the cells you want to merge into one cell. The cells you want to merge must be close to each other.
   
   If there is data in more than one cells, then excel will only keep the most top-left cell data
   
   
   
   
2. Go to the Home tab and click merge & center if you want to combine the cells and center the content.
   
   
   
   If you don’t want to combine them like that, then click the menu dropdown. From the dropdown, there are 4 choices you can pick.
   • Merge & Center: merge your cells and then center the resulting cell content
   • Merge Across: merge your cells per row
   • Merge Cells: merge your cells normally
   • Unmerge Cells: separate your merged cells if they have already merged
   
   
   
   
   
3. Done! Now, you can see that your cells have been combined by the merge cell menu!
   
   
   
   

Merge Cells Shortcut

To activate the merge cells feature in excel, you can use a shortcut. After highlighting all the cells you want to merge, this shortcut is activated by pressing Alt and then H then M. After that, press one of the letter buttons below according to the merge cells function you want to use.

• C: merge & center
• A: merge across
• M: merge cells
• U: unmerge cells

Note that you can only use this shortcut in Windows. Mac doesn’t have a particular shortcut to activate the merge cells feature.

Additional Note

If you use filter & sort on your data headers, then you need to be careful when using merge cells! Your merged cells will make your data cannot be sorted. Besides that, you cannot involve your merged cells data in your filter process.



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