alternative to merge and center in excel

look what happens:Įxcel doesn’t want to allow me to include column D alone… it wants to include Column C as well. In I1 I entered =Countif( … then I tried to select my range, column D…. Let’s say I want to count the number of 22 year old students in my class. (Shameless plug: come to an Excel: Pivot Tables training if you would like to learn more.) Formulas this means that Excel doesn’t know what our categories are to create a PivotTable. What is this? We are receiving an error because we don’t have true column labels (header row) when cells are merged like they are in our top row. Maybe instead, we can make a PivotTable from the data, and pivot by the letter grade? Go to the Insert tab, and select PivotTable. Normally I would have the opportunity to filter by letter grade, but because E1 and F1 were merged cells, Excel instead only offers for you to filter by grade %. Now, Go to the dropdown created next to Grade. Click anywhere in the top row, and on the right side of the Home tab, select Sort and Filter, and Filter.Ģ. You want to filter by all students with an A.ġ. Let’s say I would like to use the custom Filter buttons we play with in Excel Essentials. There are actually quite a few ways that merged cells can be problematic. Perhaps someone did this in an attempt to make their spreadsheet look less cluttered? Let’s see why this might have been a bad idea.

If you select any of these, notice in your A lignment group that Merge and Center is selected. The first row of data contains 3 sets of merged cells: A1 with B1 C1 with D1 and E1 with F1. This is a fictional list of students and grades, with some merged cells at the top. If you would like to follow along with my demonstration below, here is an Exercise file: MergedCells That being said… not only is the beauty of a spreadsheet less important than its functionality, which is definitely adversely affected by merged cells… but there is actually a way to alter the appearance identically to merging cells without all of the many disadvantages that come with merged cells.

People usually merge cells in an attempt to make a spreadsheet look nicer.

Friends don’t let friends merge cells! This is something you hear often among Excel enthusiasts.

Alternative to merge and center in excel