Often we are asked to help a colleague with a relatively simple task that they find to be all too frustrating when they don't know the technique. One of these techniques involves putting multiple lines in a single Excel cell. This week's Technology Tip of the Week will demonstrate two techniques to help resolve that issue.
Tip #30: Excel Revisited - Multiple Lines per Cell
DEFINITIONS:
Cell: The "box" in which all entries, formulae and objects are stored in a spreadsheet, named by the cell's column letter and row number.
Word Wrap: The ability of a piece of software to automatically move the cursor (and perhaps text) to the next line (left justified) without the need to press the enter/return key at the end of a line.
Carriage Return: The effect of pressing the return or enter key in a word processor - the cursor moves to the next line and "returns" to the left-hand position. This term refers to the typewriter's carriage of not-too-long ago.
Opening an Excel spreadsheet from either the Start menu or a Tools folder on your desktop is the first step. Click on a single cell (or highlight a group of cells using CTRL-Click/Shift-Click). From the menu bar choose Format, Cells... The dialog box in Figure 1 appears. Click on the Alignment tab.
You can choose where you want your information located within the cell and how it will be justified (horizontal alignment) using the two drop-down boxes shown as Horizontal and Vertical.
By activating the Wrap text checkbox, words in a cell will wrap as described in the Definition section of this tip. The results can be seen in Figure 2 below where cell A1 has the Wrap text checked and cell A2 does not.
The real power comes into play if you are trying to place a lot of text in a single cell and have information in an adjacent cell, for example: cell B1 and B2 above. With the aid of justification and location, one can accurately position text in a single cell as easily as you can in a word processor.
Forcing a carriage return: If you need to break a line of text in a cell, simply press the ALT-Enter key combination at that point where you want to break the line. This is shown in Figure 2, cell A3 where the text was broken after the word "demo". Incidentally, this latter technique automatically turns on the Wrap text format for that cell.
