How to unmerge cells in Excel
This short tutorial shows how to quickly unmerge cells in Excel, how to find all merged cells in a worksheet, and how to fill each unmerged cell with the original value from the merged cell.
When you have related data in several cells, you may be tempted to combine them into a single cell for alignment or comparison purposes. So, you merge a few smaller cells into a bigger one only to realize that merged cells have made it impossible to perform the simplest tasks on your worksheet. For example, you cannot sort data in columns that have at least one merged cell. Filtering or even selecting a range might also be a problem. Well, how do you unmerge cells in Excel to get things back to normal? Below, you will find a few simple techniques.
How to unmerge cells in Excel
Unmerging cells in Excel is easy. Here's what you do:
- Select one or more cells you want to unmerge.
- On the Home tab, in the Alignment group, click Merge & Center.
Or, click the drop-down arrow next to the Merge & Center button and select Unmerge Cells.
Either way, Excel will unmerge all the merged cells in the selection. The contents of each merged cell will be placed into the upper-left cell, other unmerged cells will be empty:
How to split all merged cells in a worksheet
At first sight, the task may seem cumbersome, but in fact it takes only a couple of mouse clicks.
To unmerge all cells on the sheet, you do the following:
- Select the entire worksheet. For this, either click the little triangle in the upper-left corner of the worksheet or press the Ctrl + A shortcut.
- With all the cells in the sheet selected, have a look at the Merge & Center button:
- If it is highlighted, click it to unmerge all merged cells in the worksheet.
- If it is not highlighted, there are no merged cells in the sheet.
How to unmerge cells and copy the original value to each unmerged cell
To improve the structure of your dataset, you may often need not only to unmerge cells but also fill each unmerged cell with the value from the original cell, as shown in the screenshot below:
To unmerge cells and fill down with duplicate values, please follow these steps:
- Select your table (or just the columns that have merged cells) and click the Merge & Center button on the Home tab. This will split all merged cells, but only the upper-left unmerged cells will be filled with data.
- Select the entire table again, go to the Home tab > Editing group, click Find & Select, and then click Go To Special…
- In the Go To Special dialog window, tick off the Blanks option, and click OK:
- With all the blank cells selected, type the equality sign (=) and press the Up Arrow key. This will create a simple formula that fills the first blank cell with the value from the above cell:
- Since you want to fill all unmerged cells that are currently blank, press Ctrl + Enter to enter the formula in all the selected cells.
As the result, each blank cell is filled with the value from the previously merged cell:
How to split the contents of the merged cell across several cells
In situations when a merged cell contains a few pieces of information, you may want to put those pieces into separate cells. Depending on your data structure, there are a few possible ways to handle this task:
- Text to Columns - allows splitting text strings by a specified delimiter such as comma, semicolon or space as well as separating substrings of a fixed length.
- Flash Fill - a quick way to split relatively simple text strings of the same pattern.
- Formulas to split text strings and numbers - best to be used when you need a custom solution for a specific dataset.
- Split Text tool - the tool to try when all of the above methods have failed. It can split cells by any specified character or a few different characters, by string and mask (a pattern that you specify).
When the contents of the merged cells are split into individual cells, you are free to unmerge cells or delete the merged cells altogether.
How to find merged cells in Excel
You already know that merged cells are something you should avoid in your Excel worksheets. But what if you have been given a poorly structured spreadsheet and you are trying to convert it into something useful. The problem is the sheet contains a fairly big amount of merged cells you don't know about.
So, how do you find merged cells in your worksheet? Just remember that merging cells relates to alignment, and alignment is part of formatting, and Excel Find can search by format :) Here's how:
- Press Ctrl + F to open the Find dialog box. Or, go to the Home tab > Editing group, and click Find & Select > Find.
- In the Find and Replace dialog box, click the Options button, and then click Format…
- Switch to the Alignment tab, select the Merge cells check box under Text control, and click OK.
- And now, click either:
- Find Next to get to the next merged cell.
- Find All to get a list of all merged cells.
When you click one of the found items, Excel will select the corresponding merged cell in your worksheet:
That's how you unmerge cells in Excel. I thank you for reading and hope to see you on our blog again next week!
