TLC Tips of the Week:                          from Helen Olberg

This week’s tip concerns combining cells in an Excel worksheet or cells of a Word table.

Too often it becomes difficult to center a title over cells in a worksheet or table. You eyeball it, add/delete spaces, eyeball it again, and readjust.  A better way is to combine adjacent cells and align within that single big cell. Here’s how to do it:

1. Type or copy your data into the upper-leftmost cell within the range.
2. Select the cells you want to merge. They must be adjacent horizontally, vertically, or both.
3. In Excel - click the Merge and Center button on the Formatting toolbar.
   In the Word table – right-click the selected area and click Merge Cells.

Warning   Both Excel and Word will place only the upper-leftmost data in the selected range of cells into the resulting merged cells. If there is data in other cells, the data is deleted.

You can change the horizontal text alignment in the merged cell by clicking the Align Left, Center, or Align Right button on the Formatting toolbar.

To change the vertical alignment:

·        Excel - use the options on the Alignment tab (Cells command, Format menu).

·        Word – right click the merged cell, left-click Cell Alignment and select the alignment of your choice.

To split apart merged cells: (All data in the cells will be placed into the upper left cell.)

In Excel – select the merged cell and click the Merge and Center on the Formatting toolbar.

In Word – right-click the merged cell and left-click Split Cells… and fill in the number of rows and columns.

BIG HINT: Don’t forget that you can UNDO if you make a mistake!

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