Excel Tutorial – How to Combine Columns, Rows, and Cells?

There are many different scenarios in which you might use Excel to integrate information. At other times, it's to make the formatting look better. At other times, it serves the purpose of bringing information from a number of cells into a single cell.

Excel presents us with a number of opportunities to deal with textual data. It may be a name, an address, an email address, or any number of other possible text sequences. Excel users will frequently find themselves in a situation where they need to merge adjacent cells that contain text data.

Merge Cells for Excel is the perfect aid for you to use if you need to combine numerous cells into one, merge columns row-by-row, or merge rows column-by-column.

All of these tasks may be performed using Merge Cells for Excel. Simply pick a range, decide what you want to combine, select a delimiter that will keep values distinct, and then click the Merge button, your cells will be combined in an instant with no values being lost.

In this tutorial, you are going to learn the ways to combine columns, rows and cells in Excel.

Combine Cells in Excel

When you are establishing a title row in your Excel spreadsheet, you may find it necessary to merge numerous cells. This is one of the most common situations in which this occurs.

Step 1

In our example, we have some student’s information like roll no, section, first name, and last name in an Excel sheet. See the following image.

We want to merge the cell from A1 to D1. Follow the steps given below.

Step 2

Select the cells you want to merge. In our case, we have selected from A1 to D1. Then go to Home > Alignment > Merge and Centre. From the drop-down list, select Merge cells.

After that, you will see the cells have been merged.

Combine Columns in Excel

You are not restricted to combining individual cells when working in Excel. There is also the option to combine whole columns of data. To perform this task, In Excel data, you could use the CONCATENATE function to make the things easier.

Step 1

In above example give, we have First name and last name of the students. We want to combine the name into one column. To do this, select one blank cell in which you want to write the data of the combined columns and write the formula given below. In our case we have selected E3.

=CONCATENATE(C3," ",D3) 

After pressing Enter, we can see the data of C3 and D3 has been combined. See the below given image.

Step 2

To reflect in other cells, drag the AutoFill handle down to apply the formula. See the following image.

Combine Rows in Excel

Excel doesn't have a quick and easy trick or feature for merging rows. You will need to use the CONCATENATE function, just like you did when you merged columns.

Step 1

In our above example, Let’s suppose we want to assign some task to two students or we want to make a group of two students. In that case, we can use the following formula to combine the rows which contains their name.

=CONCATENATE(E3,",",E4) 

Here E3 and E4 is the rows in our example. After pressing enter, the names have been combined with comma separator as shown in below given image. Here comma is optional. You may or may not add comma or else you can modify the above formula as per your need.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we explained in a step-by-step manner how you can combine rows, columns, and cells in Excel.