Microsoft Excel Tutorial - How to Merge Cells

Merging cells in Microsoft Excel worksheet is a process of turning multiple cells into one cell by getting rid of the grid lines that separate the multiple cells. Any rectangular area that consists of multiple cells can be merged together to create one large rectangular area. In this tutorial I will show you how to merge cells and make them look distinguished from the other non merged cells.

1. Open a Microsoft Excel worksheet.

This would work better with a worksheet that has data would you do not need in the worksheet in order to follow along this tutorial.

2. Select the cells

Highlight a group of cells in a rectangular area by holding down on the left mouse button and dragging it from one point to another to select multiple cells that you want to merge.

3. Click Format -> Cells

The next step to merge cells in this Excel worksheet is to click on "Format" and then "Cells". Another way is to right click anywhere on any of the highlighted cells and in the context menu click "Format Cells".

4. Alignment Tab

To merge the cells, click on the alignment tab in the window that pops up.

5. Checkmark "Merge cells"

There is a section called "text control" that has a check box with the text "merge cells". Check mark this check box and click OK.

You will see now that all of the small cells became one large cell and all of the grid lines went away. You would likely want this one large cell look distinguished to differentiate it from the other normal cells. You can do this by creating an outline for the cell.

Once again, right click on this large cell and click format cells, otherwise follow the above steps 1 and two to bring up that same dialog window. This time go to the "border" tab. Click on the box called "outline". On the right, you will have different options for how you want the outline to look. I use the default option for this tutorial. Once you are finished making the customized the selections click on OK.

You will now see that the merged cells have an outline to distinguish them from the other regular cells.

You can do this for whatever sells you'd like to merge. This is usually done to group different sections of the Excel worksheet so that it is easier to tell what each section means. You can customize the look (background color, border color, etc) to whatever you like and that can be done in the previous window where you clicked the border button to create the border of the merged cells in the Excel worksheet.