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Use Alt+Enter to get multiple lines in a cell [spreadcheats]

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line-break-excel-howtoA very quick spreadcheat for Friday. If you need to type content in a cell and you want to see it in multiple lines then use alt + enter to break the content in several lines. See to the right for an example.

Bonus tip: If you are using formulas to create content in a cell by combining various text values and you want to introduce line breaks at certain points … For eg. you are creating an address field by combining house number, street name, city and zip code and you want to introduce line breaks after house number and street name then you can use CHAR(10). Like this:

wrap-text-excel-cells=housenumber & CHAR(10) & streetname & CHAR(10) & city & zipcode

Remember when you do this, you need to enable wrap-text feature for that cell from cell formatting dailog (ctrl+1) to ensure proper display.

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11 Responses to “Use Alt+Enter to get multiple lines in a cell [spreadcheats]”

  1. Ketan says:

    @Chandoo:
    One more useful trick.......
    In a column you have no. of data in rows and need to copy in the next row from the previous row, no need to go for the previous rows but entering Alt + down arrow, you will get the list of data, (in asending order), entered in the previous rows...

  2. Jorge Camoes says:

    This is another great tip. I use this all the time to make sense of some *very* long formulas. As soon as the formula is debugged I remove the break.

  3. Tony Rose says:

    Great tip Chandoo!

    I use this feature often and it has even gotten the, "how did you do that" response.
    Thanks!

  4. Chandoo says:

    @Ketan: Alt+down arrow is an awesome tip. I never knew it and now I am using it everyday.

    @Jorge, Tony: Agree... 🙂

  5. how can we merge a two sheet.

  6. yan says:

    excellent idea. Chandoo you are genious

  7. Hi chandoo,
    I have used ctrl+enter to break the cell. But I did not get the result.

    Please tell me how can i break the cell in multiple lines.
     

  8. Yasir says:

    hi Chandoo....
    how we can use Alt+Enter in multiple rows at the same time please reply hurry i have lot of work and have no time and i m stuck in this. 🙁

  9. Ahmad B. Al-Qadeeri says:

    Alt+J worked once 🙁
    So I found another more reliable way:
    =SUBSTITUTE(A2,CHAR(13),"")
    Where A2 is the cell that contains the line breaks which the code for it is CHAR(13). It will replace it with whatever inside the ""

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