Unmerge Cells in Excel
One of many features of Microsoft Office Excel is the ability to merge or unmerge cells within a worksheet. When working in Excel, you can use the tools to split data among two or more cells within a chart or spreadsheet. Cell contents must have been previously merged before you can unmerge, or split, them. Follow the steps in this article to unmerge cells in Excel, as well as split contents across multiple cells.
Contents
Steps
Unmerge a Single Cell
- Highlight the merged cell.
- Find the Merge and Center button in the Formatting toolbar at the top of your Excel file.
- The button will display a border to show that it has been selected.
- Click on the Merge and Center button to split, or unmerge, the cell.
- Contents of the merged cell move to the upper-left cell within the range of split cells after you deselect the Merge and Center button.
Split Cells Across Contents of a Spreadsheet
- Locate the text values within your spreadsheet that you want to unmerge. Choose the cells, cell range or column.
- Cell ranges can be no more than one column wide. However, the number of rows within a cell range can vary.
- Any data that is located to the right of any selected columns may be overwritten, unless those spaces are left blank.
- Look for the Data menu at the top of the Excel document. At the Data menu, click Text to Columns to unmerge the contents of cells across more than one cell.
- Highlight the cell, range or column that you want to convert.
- Start the Convert Text to Columns Wizard. When the new window appears, choose your original data type, whether it is fixed width or delimited.
- Fixed width refers to fields within the spreadsheet that are aligned in columns. Spaces appear between each field.
- Delimited data type refers to any characters that separate each field, such as tabs or commas.
- Click Next to follow additional instructions.
- If you choose to define your data type as delimited, then follow the second step, which allows you to set delimiters according to space, comma, semicolon or tab.
- If you decide to use fixed widths, or column breaks, then follow the instructions to create a column break line, or move or delete a column break line.
- Pick the data format for each column or cell you want to unmerge. In the third step of the Convert to Text Columns Wizard, choose the column data format, whether it is General, Date or Text. Text format converts information into text, date format converts to month/date/year format and general format turns date values into dates, numeric values into numbers and other information into text.
- In date format, you can also specify date, month, year; year, month, date; month, year, date, and more.
- Data format settings apply whether you work with delimited or fixed data types.
- Unmerge cells and cell data. Click Finish to see the results of your work, and repeat the steps to unmerge other cells within your spreadsheet.
