Merge Cells in Excel [Easy Step-by-Step]

It is easy to Merge Cells in Excel. This article is an easy-to-understand, detailed, and step-by-step guide to merging cells in Microsoft Excel.

Also read: How to add borders to cells in Excel

Steps to Merge Cells in Excel

Let’s get started with learning different types of merging for cells in a sheet.

First, we take an example of an unmerged and fairly unorganized dataset below-

You can clearly see that the following table is completely unorganized and looks distorted. You would need to merge the cells to improve the structure of the database.

Using the Merge & Center Tool

Let us start merging the heading cells first. Here is how we can merge cells in Excel-

You can see that the heading is dividing and overlapping into 3 cells. To merge these three cells into one, we need to use the Merge & Center tool. Here is how-

Select the number of cells you want to merge into one single cell, like this-

Go to the Home tab, under the Alignment section, select Merge & Center.
This option will merge your cells and apply center alignment for your text. This is how your heading cell looks like now-

Merge Across Tool to Merge Cells in Excel

We will now merge all cells with topics at once with the Merge Across tool. With the “merge across” tool, you can avoid merging cells beneath each other to be merged as one. Only cells placed across (side by side) will be merged as one.

To merge all topics, select all cells with topics in the list.
Go to the Home tab, under the Alignment section, pull down on Merge & Center and select Merge Across.
All topics have been merged systematically. You can slightly adjust cell sizes to view the text legibly. Here is how your topics should look like now-

Unmerge Cells Tool

To unmerge cells and bring them back to their original conditions, you must do as follows:

Select the cells that are merged.
Go to the Home tab, under the Alignment section, pull down on Merge & Center and select Unmerge Cells.
All cells have become independent now and have been unmerged. Here is an illustration-

Unmerged Heading with Unmerge Cells Option

Merge Cells Tool

To merge cells without center alignment, you can use the Merge Cells tools under Merge & Center.

Select the cells you want to merge.
Go to the Home tab, under the Alignment section, pull down on Merge & Center, and select Merge Cells.
The cells have been merged without the text being center-aligned, like this-

Conclusion

This was a detailed step-by-step guide on merging cells in Excel for multiple types of datasets. If you have any questions regarding merging cells in Excel, drop a comment and we will answer your queries!