Note: It is recommended to use the merging options of the merge and center drop-down in worksheets that are just meant for presentation purposes. Once merged, it becomes difficult to sort data whether in an ascending or a descending order. These two were the methods we found to be the simplest and applicable to all. The merging options of the merge and center drop-down merge only the excel cells, not their values. There are plenty of other ways in Excel, like using VB script, or the TEXTJOIN function (available in newer versions and Office 365). It’s important to note though, that these are not the only two ways to do this. In this tutorial, we showed you two ways in which you can combine first and last names into a single column in Excel. So, even if you delete the original two columns containing first and last names respectively, the combined column remains unaffected. Since this method doesn’t involve a formula, it doesn’t depend on the original columns. In the same way, you can also set the pattern to have the last name followed by a comma, followed by the first name. Finally, we concatenated the value in C2 (the last name). We followed this by a dot operator and space. Here, we specified that if cell B2 is not blank (that means if a middle name exists), we want just the first character from the cell B2. (The options work basically the same, but Merge Across doesn’t center the cell content. Click on Merge & Center, or choose Merge Across from the dropdown. Then, find the Merge & Center option on the ribbon on the Home tab. Select the Cells that you want to merge, click on the Home tab and then click on Merge button. This can be across multiple columns or multiple rows. The LEFT() function takes the specified number of characters starting from the left side of the text in a cell. To merge cells in Excel, start by highlighting multiple cells. If you want to have the first name, followed by the middle name’s initial, followed by the last name, then your formula in D2 can be =CONCATENATE(A2,IF(B2=””,” “,” “&LEFT(B2,1)&”.”),C2).If you have a first name, last name, and a middle name in cells A2, B2, and C2 respectively, your formula in D2 can be =CONCATENATE(A2,” “,B2,” “,C2).You can replace the separating character with any character you need.So for this example, C3 would have the formula: =CONCATENATE(B2,”, “,A2) Also, replace the first cell reference with the second cell reference and vice-versa. If you want to put the last name followed by a comma, followed by the first name, then instead of a space, put a comma within quotes.Merge Across: Combines only the selected cells in a row, but not the cells in a column.Merge & Center: Combines selected Cells into a Single Cell and the content within the cell will be centered.The Merge Cells Function in Excel provides a few more option that you might be interested in.Ĭlick on the Down Arrow next to the “Merge Icon” and you will be able to see all the available Merge options in the drop-down menu. You will immediately see the Merged Cell reverting back in to individual single cells. Simply, select the Merged cell and click on Merge/Unmerge icon.Īlternately, you can also click on the Down Arrow next to the “Merge/Unmerge” icon and click on Unmerge Cells option in the drop-down menu.Ģ. Unmerging Cells in Excel is just as easy as Merging cells.ġ. Once you click on OK, you will immediately see the selected cells Merged or combined into a single cell.Īs you can see in above image, cells A1 to D1 have been merged into a single Cell. On the pop-up that appears, click on OK to confirm.ģ. Select the Cells that you want to merge, click on the Home tab and then click on Merge button.Ģ. How to Merge Cells in Excelįollow the steps below to Merge Cells in Excel.ġ. Luckily, Excel does provide a warning message informing you about such data loss when you try to Merge cells in Excel. Similarly, when you Unmerge cells containing data, all the data gets placed in the first cell and other cells become empty. When you Merge cells containing data, only the data in the upper left cell (first cell) will remain in the resulting Merged cell, while data in other cells gets discarded (See image below). What Happens to Content in Merged Cellsīefore going ahead with the steps to Merge cells in excel, it important to understand as to what happens when you Merge two or more cells containing data in an Excel spreadsheet. While the Merge function combines cells, the Unmerge option in Excel splits back previously Merged cells into individual single cells, just as they existed before being merged.