Excel has a lot of great features that
can make your spreadsheets run more
smoothly but merging cells is not one of
them merged cells are notorious for
creating problems in spreadsheets and
I'm going to show you a couple of
reasons why you shouldn't use them
unless you absolutely have to and I'll
also show you an alternative you can use
instead in this example we didn't have
sales data for this row so we merged all
four cells into one cell mainly so we
could Center the text across several
columns and sort of set it apart from
the other data but there's a problem
watch what happens when I try to sort
this data I'll try to sort largest to
smallest and it doesn't work it gives us
an error message
or let's say we wanted to copy some data
from one part of our sheet
and paste it into the merge self
that doesn't work either it gives us a
different error message so what's the
problem
well many Excel features rely on the
consistent grid of rows and columns that
every spreadsheet has by default merge
cells break out of this grid so Excel
may not know how to handle it
luckily there is another way to get the
same basic look without merging cells
first we'll need to unmerge this by
clicking the merge & Center command so
these are now separate cells
next with all four cells selected click
this little arrow in the alignment group
in the horizontal menu we'll select
center across selection
and click okay
this has centered the text perfectly and
it looks exactly like a merged cell but
it's actually separate cells most
importantly it won't cause problems the
way merged cells will for example if we
try to sort it
works and we don't get an error message
it's worth noting that center across
selection only works horizontally so for
vertical groups of cells you may still
need to merge but I recommend using
center across selection whenever you can
because it will help you avoid all of
the problems associated with merged
cells
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