When you edit an Excel, you may need to merge or unmerge cells according to your requirements. If you don’t know how to merge or unmerge cells in Excel without data loss, you can read this post from
MiniTool Software
to get some useful instructions. Besides, if you want to recover your missing Excel documents, you can try
MiniTool Power Data Recovery
.
Merge or Unmerge Cells in Excel
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet that is widely used on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. It includes features like calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Excel is a part of the Microsoft Office suite of software.
When working with Excel, you need to master a variety of skills. In this article, we will introduce how to merge and unmerge two or more cells in Excel. This trick is very important because basically everyone needs to merge or unmerge cells for structure when editing something in Excel.
How to Merge or Unmerge Cells in Excel on Windows/Mac/Web (Standard Methods)?
In this part, we will introduce how to merge or unmerge two or more cells in Excel on Windows and Mac. If you are using Excel online, you can also find ways to merge and unmerge cells in it.
How to Merge or Unmerge Cells in Excel on Windows?
In Excel, you are not allowed to split an individual cell. But you can change your mind: you can make it look like a split cell by merging the cells above it
How to Merge Cells in Excel?
Here are two ways to merge Excel cells.
When you merge multiple cells using these two methods, the contents of only one cell (the upper-left cell for left-to-right languages, or the upper-right cell for right-to-left languages) will be kept in the merged cell. The contents of the other cells that you merge will be deleted. If you want to know how to merge cells in Excel without losing data, you can find a way from the next part.
Way 1: Use the top ribbon menu
Step 1: Select the cells you want to merge.
Step 2: Select
Merge & Center
under
Home
.
This way will combine and center the contents of the selected cells in a new larger cell. Of course, this is not the only choice for the format of merged cells. If you expand Merge & Center, you can find 3 more options: Merge Across, Merge Cells, and Unmerge Cells.
Merge Across:
merge the selected cells in the same raw into one large cell. The following is the merged effect of Merge Across.
Merge Cells:
merge the selected cells into one cell. The following screenshot is the merged effect of Merge Cells.
Unmerge Cells:
split the current cell into multiple cells. This option is used to split a cell that is merged by multiple cells.
So, you can also select one of these options to merge your selected cells based on your requirements.
Way 2: Use right-click menu
An easy and direct way to merge cells in Excel is to use the right-click menu.
Step 1: Select the cells you want to merge and right-click the selected area.
Step 2: Select
Format Cells
from the right-click menu to continue.
Step 3: The Format Cells interface will pop up. Then, you need to switch to Alignment and select
Merge cells
under
Text control
.
Step 4: Click
OK
to save the merge operation.
This way only simply merges your selected cells. If you want to modify the position of the contents in the merged cell, you can use the options in the
Alignment
area under the
Home
bar.
How to Unmerge Cells in Excel?
Splitting unmerged cells is not allowed in Excel. That is, you can only unmerge a cell that is merged by multiple cells.
Here are also two ways to unmerge Excel cells:
Way 1: Use the top ribbon menu
Here is how to split cells in Excel using the top ribbon menu:
Step 1: Select the cell you want to split.
Step 2: Expand
Merge & Center
and select
Unmerge Cells
. This will split the current cell into multiple cells.
Way 2: Use the right-click menu
You can also split a merged cell by using the right-click menu.
Here we go!
Step 1: Select the Excel cell you want to split.
Step 2: Right-click the selected cell and select
Format cells
.
Step 3: Uncheck the
Merge cells
option.
Step 4: Click
OK
to save the change.
Likewise, you can also use the Alignment feature to adjust the position of the text in the cell.
How to Merge or Unmerge Cells in Excel on Mac?
Microsoft Excel is also available on Mac. If you want to merge or unmerge cells on a Mac computer, you can follow these guides:
How to Merge Cells in Excel?
Keep in mind that only the text on the upper-left cell will be kept. All texts in the other merged cells will be removed. If you still want to use any data from those other cells, you can copy them to another cell in the worksheet before you merge.
You can merge two or more cells using these steps:
Step 1: Select the cells you want to merge into a larger one.
Step 2: Select
Merge & Center
under the
Home
tab. You can also click the arrow next to Merge & Center, then select
Merge Across
or
Merge Cells
according to your requirements.
How to Unmerge Cells in Excel?
Step 1: Click on the merged cell you want to split.
Step 2: Click
Unmerged Cells
under
Merge & Center
.
See! It is easy to unmerge a cell in Excel on Mac.
How to Merge or Unmerge Cells in Excel Web?
How to Merge Cells in Excel?
You need to make sure that only one of the cells you want to merge has text.
You can use these steps to merge cells in Excel web:
Step 1: Click the first cell, then press the
Shift
key on your keyboard and click the last cell in the cell range you want to merge.
Step 2: Go to
Hone > Merge & Center
. Likewise, you can also click the arrow icon next to Merge & Center and select
Merge Across
or
Merge Cells
to merge Excel cells according to your requirements.
If the Merge & Center option is unavailable, you need to make sure that you are not going to edit a cell or the cells you want to merge are not inside a table.
If you want to modify the position of the text in the merged cell, you can use the options in the
Alignment
area (next to Merge & Center) under the
Home
tab.
If you regret it, you can undo the change by selecting the merged cell and clicking Merge & Center again.
How to Unmerge Cells in Excel?
If you want to unmerge cells immediately after merging cells in Excel web, you can press Ctrl + Z to undo the change.
You can also use these steps to unmerge cells in Excel web:
Step 1: Click the cell (you have merged) in Excel web.
Step 2: Go to
Home > Merge & Center
.
The text or data in the merged cell will be moved to the left cell after splitting the cells. You can move the text or data to any other cell according to your requirements.
How to Merge or Unmerge Cells in Excel without Losing Data?
As you can see, the standard merge cells feature can only retain the text in the top left cell within the range you want to merge. If you want to keep all text in all cells you want to merge, do you know what you can do?
In this part, we will show you two easy methods.
Way 1: Use the Justify Feature
This method cannot justify cells containing numbers and formulas. Besides, if there is a blank cell between two cells, you will also be not allowed to merge the text in the cells.
Step 1: Enlarge the width of the column to make sure the width is enough for all text on the cells you want to merge.
Step 2: Under Home, go to
Fill > Justify
.
Step 3: The following screenshot is the content merging effect. Then, you can use the standard method to merge cells based on your needs.
Way 2: Combine Two or More Cells in Excel Using Excel Formulas
You can use Excel formulas to combine cells in Excel. With this method, you can choose to retain all texts in the selected cells.
Support that you want to merge A2 and B2, you can select a blank cell to save the combined text and use one of the following Excel formulas:
=CONCATENATE(A2,", ",B2)
=A2&", "&B2
It is convenient to use Excel formulas to combine the content in Excel cells. For example, you can use
=CONCATENATE(A2, ": ", B2, ", ", C2)
formula to separate values with different delimiters.
Here is one thing you need to know: if you only want to use the content in the merged cell, you can copy the cell and paste the content only with value.
These are the two ways to merge cells in Excel without losing data. You can select one way as your wish.
How to Recover Your Missing Excel Files?
If your important Excel files are deleted or lost due to some reason, do you know how to get them back?
You can use professional
data recovery software
to recover them if they are not overwritten by new data. MiniTool Power Data Recovery is worth trying.
This MiniTool data recovery software is designed to recover all kinds of files from different types of data storage devices, including computer internal hard drives, external hard drives, SSDs, SD cards, memory cards, USB flash drives, pen drives, and more. This program can work on all versions of Windows, including the latest Windows 11.
This software has a free edition, which allows you to recover up to 1 GB of files without limits. So, you can first try this
free file recovery tool
and see if it can find and retrieve your files.
After downloading and installing this tool on your Windows PC, you can follow this guide to recover your missing Excel files:
Step 1: Open MiniTool Power Data Recovery to enter its main interface.
Step 2: Hover over the drive you want to recover your missing Excel files from, then click the Scan button to start scanning that drive.
Step 3: When the scanning process ends, you can see the scan results that are categorized by path by default. If you only want to recover Excel files, you can switch to the
Type
tab and go to
Document > xlsx
or
xls
to find your needed files.
You can click the
Preview
button to preview the selected file. This software allows you to preview up to 70 types of files. However, if you use the free edition for the first time, you need to download and install the package of file previewer and then preview files.
Step 4: Select your needed Excel files, click the
Save
button, and select a suitable folder to save them.
You can directly use the recovered files.
If you want to recover more than 1GB of files using this software, you need to upgrade to an advanced edition. You can go to the MiniTool official site to get one.
Wrap Things up
How to merge two cells in Excel? How to merge or unmerge cells in Excel? How to merge Excel cells without losing data? After reading this article, you can get useful and easy methods to do this job. In addition, if you want to recover lost and deleted files on your Windows computer, you can try MiniTool Power Data Recovery.
Should you have other suggestions or issues that need to be fixed, you can let us know in the comments. You can also contact us via
[email protected]
.
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