I sure wish Microsoft had put someone in charge of this task during the development of the Office Suite since 2006. Their objective was to everything with just four presses. Supposedly, at the height of its popularity there was a person on every project team at Palm whose job it was to count the stylus inputs required to accomplish every task. I never owned a Palm Pilot, but friends of mine did. Or a move my hand from the keyboard to the mouse, then b do 1 or 2 mouse clicks to display the Table Layout options, then c click Split cells, then d move my hand back to the keyboard. But most of the time, I have to use four key presses to bring it up Alt-release, J, L, P. Every so often, my fingers remember where it is, and I press it. Starting with 2007, that keystroke still works, but it is not shown anywhere in the interface. In Word versions before 2007, it was a single keystroke. What's more, there is a shortcut key that opens the Split Cells dialog box. If we need to merge cells, then we need to merge cells, and Word provides a way to do it. Your comment about merged cells not being useful is irrelevant. The question was about a Word table, but your answer is about Excel. That method maintains the structural integrity of the worksheet. If you don't mind some personal advice :- most experienced users of Excel recommend avoiding the use of merged cells altogether. The other replies in that conversation apparently were from users of Excel for Windows. However, you cannot assign custom keyboard shortcuts in Excel 2016. Supposing you want to combine two cells in your Excel sheet, A2 and B2, and both cells have data in them.Īs the Answer in that thread stated, there is no built-in keyboard shortcut for that purpose. I don't care about obtaining detail about which value matches which. If somebody could help me out that would be great. Thanks again for saving me from having to search further! Many of the old threads have been read thousands of times. Please keep up the good work and I’m sure you’ll find I’m not the only one who’s not a fan of “merge”.※ Download: ?dl&keyword=shortcut+for+merge+and+center+in+excel&source=īy default, your hotkeys will be Alt + 4. I’m yet to find a “Centre across selection” button. The Excel toolbar adds to this bias for merge by having Merge and Centre as a default item. I “inherit” a lot of “other people’s work” here in the office, and resorted to writing some simple VBA to replace merged text with Centre across selection for a selected range. To some these may appear petty – however I’m an old-excel-school keyboard based speed demon. cells need to be same width and it only has to be out by 0.01 – copy/paste gets trickier in the destination when you’re copying ranges to a new place e.g.
– cell reference – can get trickier to unpack a formula in a busy sheet as the reference is the top left corner of the cell, not where the text might appear visually – I’m a keyboard shortcut fiend and Ctrl-Space can end up selecting more columns than you want, and often have to grab the mouse to select the column letter instead
– scrolling down a column with arrow and selection moving away from where you want “ For mine Center Across Selection covers all regular uses of merge cells and has none of its irritations: To sing the praises of Center Across Selection, we hand over to Greg H from lovely Adelaide, South Australia: But ‘Center across Selection’ leaves the five cells (notice the vertical cell marks just before and after the text) with the text seemingly overlaying the cells.
There’s no vertical cell marks in ‘Merge & Center’ (because it’s a single cell instead of five). The individual cells remain in place, there’s no merging. The lesser known cousin is Format Cells | Alignment | Horizontal | Center Across Selection. Opening a workbook you’ve never seen before, anything formatted with Merge & Center is quite obvious. Merge & Center is commonly used and understood. Use the option for headings that span many columns. Sets the horizontal alignment to Center or, if you prefer Centre.