How to merge cells in Excel: Merge & Center, unmerging, and what survives

To merge cells in Excel: select two or more adjacent cells, then on the Home tab select Merge & Center, then Merge Cells. The selection becomes one larger cell covering the same grid positions. One thing survives the operation: the contents of the upper-left cell, in left-to-right languages. Everything the other cells held is deleted, and unmerging later brings back the cells, not their deleted contents.

This page covers the merge commands and what each one does, the deletion rule and how to work around it, unmerging on Windows, Mac, and the web (where the menu has no Unmerge item), and the sorting trouble merged cells cause afterwards.

How do I merge cells in Excel?

Microsoft’s merge page opens its Mac and web instructions with the definition: “Merging combines two or more cells to create a new, larger cell.” The use it names is a label that spans several columns, and that is the whole of what the feature does: it moves cell borders, not data.

Merging takes three steps:

1. Copy anything you need from every cell except the upper-left one to another place in the worksheet. Microsoft’s instructions make this the first move, because the merge is about to delete those contents.
2. Select the two or more adjacent cells to merge, with the data you want to keep in the upper-left cell.
3. On the Home tab, select Merge & Center, then Merge Cells.

If Merge & Center is disabled, Microsoft’s tip names two causes to check: a cell is open for editing, or the cells you want to merge are inside an Excel table.

What do Merge & Center, Merge Across, and Merge Cells each do?

The button and its arrow menu hold four commands, and the differences are centering and shape.

• Merge & Center merges the selection and centers the surviving content. That centering is its own addition: Microsoft presents the next two items, on the arrow beside the button, as the ways to merge without centering.
• Merge Cells turns the whole selection into one merged cell, no centering.
• Merge Across merges the cells in each selected row as a separate merged cell, one per row. Select three rows across two columns and you get three one-row merged cells, not one block. That per-row shape is what Microsoft’s developer reference documents for the across option of the merge feature.
• Unmerge Cells reverses a merge; it gets its own section below.

Excel for the web is leaner: its instructions merge only through Merge Cells, and removing the centering afterwards is an alignment change, done by selecting the merged cell and picking one of the left, center, or right options under Align.

What happens to the data when you merge?

One cell’s contents make it into the merged cell: the upper-left cell’s, in left-to-right languages. Everything the other cells held is deleted, not hidden, which is why Microsoft’s Mac instructions tell you to copy those contents elsewhere in the worksheet before merging, and why the web instructions set the precondition that only one cell in the range should have data at all.

If what you actually want is one cell holding both values, so nothing is lost, that is a join, not a merge: concatenate in Excel covers =A2&" "&B2 and the function forms that combine values without deleting anything.

How do I unmerge cells in Excel?

The route depends on the platform, because the menus differ:

• Excel for Windows. Select the merged cell, select the Merge & Center down arrow, then Unmerge Cells.
• Excel for Mac. Choose the same Unmerge Cells item from the Home > Merge & Center menu.
• Excel for the web. There is no Unmerge Cells item. Select the merged cell and choose Home > Merge & Center, then Merge Cells, and the merge toggles off; the web instructions add that the merged cell’s data lands in the left cell once the cells split. They also give the fastest exit: Ctrl+Z, pressed immediately after merging, removes the merge.

Unmerging restores the separate cells and nothing else. The contents deleted at merge time are gone, so a merge-then-unmerge round trip costs every value except the upper-left one. And if the problem is the opposite shape, one cell sitting where two used to, that cell is merged rather than missing a split; the ways to pull one cell’s contents apart are covered in how to split cells in Excel.

Is there a keyboard shortcut for merging cells?

Not a documented one. Microsoft’s merge page gives every procedure as ribbon clicks, and its Excel keyboard shortcuts reference, which covers Windows, Mac, and the web, lists no key combination for merging cells. The single key press the merge page documents runs the other way: in the Excel for the web instructions, Ctrl+Z immediately after a merge unmerges it.

How do I merge two columns in Excel?

Two different jobs hide under this phrase, and they need different tools:

• Combining the values, so one column’s rows each hold what two columns held, is formula work. Merging would keep one value per merge and delete the other, so use the join patterns in concatenate in Excel instead.
• Making cells span the columns is the merge job. One heading across both columns is an ordinary merge of the heading cells. To span both columns on every row, select the cells in both columns and choose Merge Across: each row becomes its own merged cell. The deletion rule still applies per row, each merged row keeping only its left cell’s contents, so this is a layout move for label rows, not a way to combine data.

Why won’t Excel sort a column with merged cells?

The cost of merged cells shows up later, when someone sorts. Microsoft’s page on finding merged cells documents the behavior: “Excel doesn’t sort data in a column that contains merged cells.” That page is aimed at worksheets holding merged cells you did not know were there, which is how the problem tends to arrive.

The same page has the recipe for hunting them down, documented for the Windows desktop editions:

1. Select Home > Find & Select > Find.
2. Select Options, then Format.
3. On the Alignment tab, tick Merge cells, then select OK.
4. Select Find All for a list of every merged cell on the sheet; selecting an item in the list selects that merged cell, ready to unmerge.

Merged cells also make selections misbehave: Microsoft’s developer documentation notes that selecting a range containing merged cells can produce a different selection from the one you intended.

The short version

• Select two or more adjacent cells, then Home > Merge & Center, then Merge Cells. Only the upper-left cell’s contents survive (in left-to-right languages), so copy the rest elsewhere first.
• The menu: Merge & Center centers the survivor, Merge Cells does not, Merge Across merges each selected row into its own merged cell, Unmerge Cells reverses.
• Unmerge on Windows and Mac with Unmerge Cells; Excel for the web toggles the merge off with Home > Merge & Center, then Merge Cells, or Ctrl+Z right after merging. Unmerging restores the separate cells; the deleted contents stay gone.
• No merge keyboard shortcut is documented, on the merge page or in Microsoft’s shortcut reference.
• Merged cells stop a column from sorting; Home > Find & Select > Find with the Merge cells format option lists them all on Windows. To combine values instead of cells, concatenate; to check what a merge changed, compare the files.
• If you only wanted a long label to show on several lines, wrap the text instead of merging; merging is for layout, not for making text fit.