Excel Add Line Break in A Cell

This guide will show you how to add a line break in a single cell of Microsoft Office Excel or to add space via spreading text over multiple lines in a single cell. This guide will clearly explain how to transform a single line of text information (left box) into a vertical list displayed in a single cell (right box).

Microsoft Excel does not have the same formatting options as in Microsoft Office Word. One of the most annoying features is of excel is the control of text positioning in a cell. It is not made obvious to users how to space text information over multiple lines in one cell.

 

1) The first stage is to enter all of the required information into the cell.

 

2) Place the cursor in the text panel where the line break or space is required.

3) Press Alt+Enter - this adds a line break and space in the excel cell. By pressing Enter on its own only moves onto the next cell and does not add a line break.

 

4) To see the next line of information use the scroll bar on the right of the text panel.

 

5) To expand the text panel click on the base of the bar and drag down.

6) Pullet Points can be added to the list by reading here.

7) The final example, is show below:

The feature to add a line break is very easy to perform once learnt but is not intuitive to guess how to perform. The ribbon feature grays out all of the page layout features once the cursor has been clicked in the cell and this would have been the sensible place to put an option to add a line break but for some reason the feature was never included.

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