Merge And Combine Cells In Excel Without Losing Data - Ablebits

Combine cells using Excel's Merge and Center feature

The fastest and easiest way to combine two or more cells in Excel is to use the built-in Merge and Center option. The whole process takes only 2 quick steps:

1. Select the contiguous cells you want to combine.
2. On the Home tab > Alignment group, click the Merge & Center

In this example, we have a list of fruits in cell A1 and we want to merge it with a couple of empty cells to the right (B2 and C2) to create a large cell that fits the entire list.

Once you click Merge and Center, the selected cells will be combined into one cell and the text is centered like in the following screenshot:

Join Excel cells into one

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Quickly merge cells without any formulas!

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Other merging options in Excel

To access a couple more merge options provided by Excel, click the little drop-down arrow next to the Merge & Center button and choose the option you want from the drop-down menu:

Merge Across - combine the selected cells in each row individually:

Merge Cells - join the selected cells into a single cell without centering the text:

Tip. To change the text alignment after merging, simply select the merged cell and click the desired alignment in the Alignment group on the Home tab.

Excel's merging features - limitations and specificities

When using Excel's built-in features to combine cells, there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Make sure that all the data you want to include in a merged cell is entered in the left-most cell of the selected range because only the content of the upper-left cell will survive after merging, data in all other cells will be deleted. If you are looking to combine two or more cells with data in them, check out How to merge cells without losing data.
2. If the Merge and Center button is greyed out, most likely the selected cells are in Edit mode. Press the Enter key to cancel the Edit mode, and then try to merge cells.
3. None of standard Excel merging options works for the cells inside an Excel table. You have to convert a table to a usual range first (right click the table and select Table > Convert to Range from the context menu), and then combine the cells.
4. It's not possible to sort a range containing both merged and unmerged cells.