Excel Tutorials
Combine cells into one and center a title or header across them. This lesson uses the Event Planner workbook from Excel Foundations, free to download below.
Follow along in the same file used in the video. No email required.
Merge and Center combines two or more adjacent cells into a single larger cell, then centers whatever content is inside it across that new combined space. It's most often used for a title that should visually span several columns.
It's a formatting tool, not a data tool, so it's worth knowing upfront that it can cause real problems for sorting, filtering and referencing later, which is exactly why there's a safer alternative covered further down this page.
Step-by-step, matching the video above.
Click and drag across the adjacent cells you want combined, they must be next to each other.
Go to the Home tab on the ribbon.
In the Alignment group, click Merge & Center. The selected cells combine into one, and the content centers across it. This is the same group that holds Wrap Text.
If more than one of the original cells had content, only the top-left cell's value is kept, everything else is silently deleted.
Click the same Merge & Center button again to toggle it off and return to individual cells.
The small dropdown arrow next to Merge & Center offers Merge Across, which merges each row in the selection separately instead of combining everything into one cell.
If all you actually want is text that looks centered across several columns, without the downstream problems merged cells cause, this does the same visual job differently.
Select your range, press Ctrl+1 (or right-click > Format Cells), and go to the Alignment tab.
In the Horizontal dropdown, choose Center Across Selection instead of the default.
The text visually centers across the selected cells exactly like a merge, but the cells themselves stay separate, so filtering, sorting and referencing all keep working normally.
Merged cells break both, since a merged cell only really belongs to its first row. See how to filter in Excel for more on this specific conflict.
If more than one of the cells you're merging has content, Excel keeps only the top-left value and deletes the rest without warning.
Most of the time people reach for Merge & Center purely for the visual centering effect, when Center Across Selection gives the same look without merging anything.
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Select the adjacent cells, go to the Home tab, and click Merge & Center in the Alignment group.
Only the top-left cell's content is kept. Any content in the other merged cells is deleted without warning.
A merged cell only belongs to its first row internally, so filtering or sorting a range containing merged cells often produces unexpected, misaligned results.
Center Across Selection (Format Cells > Alignment > Horizontal) visually centers text the same way without actually merging the cells.
Select the merged cell and click Merge & Center again, it toggles off and returns the cells to their original separate state.
Merge & Center combines the whole selection into one cell. Merge Across merges each row in the selection separately, useful for a multi-row selection.
Yes, Merge & Center works the same way whether the selected cells run across a row, down a column, or both.
Not usually, a merged title often looks better in print since it visually spans the full page width, which is one of the few cases where merging causes no downstream issues.
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