In the Alignment tab, from the Horizontal drop-down, select Center Across Selection.Press Control + 1 to open the Format Cells dialog box.Select the cells that you want to merge.The command is not as easy to find in Excel as the Merge & Center option, which is a pity, but it does allow sorting and highlighting without any issues. If you want to merge cells in different columns in a single row, the Center Across Selection offers a good solution. Yet another issue is that highlighting a column that contains merged cells will result in highlighting all the columns spanning the merged cells, not just the column that was selected.Another limitation when you use the Merge & Center option to merge cells is that it also prevents you from being able to sort any data that is located in cells that have been merged.If you attempt to merge cells where data is in any other cell, Excel will return the error message, вЂњMerging cells only keeps the upper-left value and discards other values.вЂќ In other words, you will lose any data that isnвЂ™t in the first cell.

If there is data in the cells being merged, Excel will only keep what is in the upper leftmost cell.Data from multiple cells will not be combined when using Merge & Center. It should be noted that Merge & Center is only a formatting command.The cell alignment may be changed if desired. The result is that both cells now behave like a single cell, which is given center alignment. In the example above, cells A1 and B1 were highlighted then the Merge & Center command was selected. Simply highlight all the cells to be merged, then click the Merge & Center icon. A quick and common way to merge cells is to use the Merge & Center command in the Home tab.

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