Microsoft Excel 
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WRAPPING AND MERGING TEXT 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
Microsoft Excel will allow long cell entries to spill 
across to other adjacent cells to the right as long 
as those cells are empty. If those cells contain 
data the spill-over will be chopped off. If you need 
to place long text entries in a cell you can arrange 
for Microsoft Excel to wrap the text within the cell 
and also merge that cell with others to 
accommodate the longer text entry. 
Try This Yourself: 
Open 
File Before starting this exercise 
you MUST open the file E723 
Cell Alignment_9.xlsx... 
 
Click in cell A5 
This cell contains a long text 
entry that spills across several 
columns… 
 
Click on the Expand Formula 
Bar
 tool  to the right of the 
formula bar to see all of the 
text 
 
Click on the Wrap Text 
command  in the 
Alignment group on the 
Home tab to wrap the text in 
cell A5 
Notice how the row height has 
now increased… 
 
Hold down the  key and 
click in cell E5 to select the 
range A5:E5 
 
Click on the drop arrow  
for Merge & Centre
  in the 
Alignment group and select 
Merge Cells to merge the cells 
in the range 
 
Move the mouse pointer to the 
bottom of the row 5 heading 
border and drag the row height 
up until you reach 30 points 
 
For Your Reference… 
 To wrap text - click in the cell to merge and 
click on the Wrap Text
 command  in the 
Alignment group on the Home tab 

 To merge text - click on the drop arrow  
for Merge & Centre
  in the Alignment 
group and select Merge Cells 
Handy to Know… 
 In the example above, wrapping forced the 
text into one cell and Excel expanded the 
row height so that all of the text was 
accommodated. We then merged the text 
across several horizontal cells in the exercise 
above so that we could reduce the row 
height to a more acceptable level. 
  
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