Excel is a dynamic spreadsheet program from Microsoft and a component of the different Office product groups for all business applications. It is an incredibly amazingly powerful tool. This tool can be used to get meaning out of a vast amount of data. However, it also works great for really simple calculations and for tracking almost any and all kind of information. The key to unlock all the affor mentioned potential is the grid cells. All these cells can contain texts, numbers or even formulas. You can also convert a PDF into an Excel File and gain access to manipulate the data from the PDF itself. Check out other related content on our blog page. For this article we want to look closely at why you should avoid merging and centering cells in excel.
For a number of people merging and centering cells in excel is the norm. However, if we are honest we will recall many times where this function have cause issues even though it solves many. Many of the issues we would come across varies, but here are a few of the most common issues you may run into:
ISSUES CAUSED BY MERGING AND CENTERING CELLS IN EXCEL
Once you begin to use excel extensively and you continue to merge and center cells you will realize that it messes with a lot of your operating within the spreadsheet. Here are some of the most common issues you may come across:
- It messes with your pivot tables – often times you are unable to truly manipulate your pivot table or pull in the data accurately once you have some cells merged and centered.
- Merging and centering cells affects your formulas – this makes calculations harder and making data less accurate as it interrupts formula data pulls
- Filtering within Excel is greatly affected – Once you have this feature on it definitely affects your ability to filter data and to look at data through filtering making analysis of information more difficult.
- Filter is not the only thing. It also affects your ability to sort data accurately as well. Merging and centering prevents you from selecting individual columns thus making impossible to effectively filter and sort them.
Above are the four main reasons why you should not always merge and center cells within excel. But if you cannot do this because it posses so much issues then what is the next best thing? What is the next option? What can be done within excel other than to merge and center the cells? These are important questions as they form the basis of this article. That being said, here we will now look at the alternative to centering your cells through merging.
MERGING AND CENTERING CELLS IN EXCEL ALTERNATIVE
Here we will now look at how to arrive at the same desired look and operation of merging and centering cells. This though is without all the issues that come along with the merging option in excel. Here is the alternative:
Step:
1 – Select a range of cells that you would like to merge and center. This can be done just as if you were going to use the merge and center function within excel
2. Right click on the selected range you choose and then click on Format Cells in the bottom section of the drop down menu. A window will pop up
3. Next you will want to click on Alignment. This is found in the heading section of the pop-up screen beside Number.
4. Under alignment you will see Text alignment and below that you will see Horizontal. This is where you select how you want your text to appear horizontally (that is from East to West across). Now you will click the drop down icon for Horizontal. You will see General, Left (indent), Center, Right (Indent), Fill, Justify, Center Across Selection and Distributed (Indent). You will now need to click on Center Across Selection and click OK!
5. Next all you will need to do is affix the color. This means that you will select the color that you want to be represented in the section you just centered across. This will make your work look more professional.
Free from Merge and Center Restrictions
And there you have it. Now you will have all the appearance of merging and centering cells without all the issues that come along with the option within excel to do this automatically. Now you can freely select the individual columns. You will no longer be limited by the merged cells anymore. So, yes, now you can Sort, filter and work with all your formulas and operate your pivot tables as well as all other common uses of excel without restrictions. I hope that this article was useful to you. If you found this article useful please follow, like and share. Thank you and have a great day all – Encyclotek.com.
