Merging two cells in multiple rows

Question

I have an excel spreadsheet with two cells in each row that I'd like to merge. Highlighting all the cells of interest and just merging from the cell formatter seems to just merge all the cells together, when instead I just want one merged cell per row. Any ideas how to do this?

I should note that one of the columns contains values (all are either true/false) and the other column is just a null cell.

Answer 1

1. Merge the two cells in the first row by selecting Home > Alignment > Merge Cells command.
2. Select the merged cell and select Home > Clipboard > Format Painter.
3. Click and hold the first cell on the next row, and select all the range by dragging your mouse. (For example, if you merged cells A1 and B1 in the previous step, now select range A2:B99.)
4. Excel applies the merge command individually to each row and you're done.

Answer 2

Excel has (had?) a Merge Across function. It's not on any of the toolbars by default, but is available as a customization. I usually add it to my Formatting toolbar, after the Merge Cells and Unmerge Cells buttons. (Right-click the toolbar, choose Customize, go to the Commands tab, select Format in the Categories list on the left, scroll down to find Merge Across, drag it to wherever you'd like.) Once it's on your toolbar, you can merge across however many cells with a single click. Important: Note that merging keeps the leftmost value only!

Unfortunately, Excel 2007/2010 has totally broken/gotten rid of the whole customization feature, so if you're using one of the newer versions, you're stuck doing the Format Painter thing.

Answer 3

use the =CONCATINATE() function to combine the data from multiple columns. Set it up in the first row and then fill down to the bottom of your data set.

Example. =CONCATENATE(A1,B1,C1)

Do not forget there will be no spaces or other dividing text between the data so if you need those you can insert manually (i.e. =CONCATENATE(A1," ",B1," ",C1)

Answer 4

Assuming you want to go from:

|       |      |
| True  |      |   #rows selected from here 
| False |      | 
| True  |      | 
| True  |      |   #down to here
|       |      |

to:

|       |      |
|     True     | 
|     False    | 
|     True     | 
|     True     | 
|       |      |

Highlight cell area you want to edit.
Home -> (Alignment) Merge and Center -> Merge Across.

Answer 5

as long as you do not have anything in the cells you want to merge then this method should work. merge the first two, then copy the merged cell. now select all the cells that you want to merge in the same fashion and paste.

Answer 6

Simply merge a couple of cells the way they should be, then copy the resulting cells and then Paste- Paste formatting on the other rows/columns. (Excel 2010)

Answer 7

Would've loved a more elegant solution on this one.

Unfortunately, all merging actions throw the rest of the data out (keeps upper left, top most data only).

Not sure if this will help you (or if you still need a solution) but to circumvent this, I saved the file as a CSV, added a place-holder column with ____ as the text, and saved the file, then opened it in a text editor, and replaced ____, with an empty value.

Thus, the result was data,data first becoming data,____,data in the CSV file, then becoming datadata after replacing in the text editor.

Hope this helps someone, as you are unlikely to still need this after almost 5 years.

Answer 8

Highlight the range of cell by -

Clicking on the drop down arrow next to "merge & center".