Excel - How to Center Across Selection

This document describes the process of centering text across a selection in Excel 2016. This is a valuable alternative to merging cells in Excel to avoid data manipulation issues.

Merging cells in Excel can be useful in some cases, but can be largely problematic when each individual cell in the group needs to be accessed later on. 

To avoid this issue, use the Center Across Selection formatting option to create identical formatting to merged cells and avoid data issues.

For information on merging cells in Excel, see Excel - How to Merge Cells

To center cells without merging:

  1. Select the grouping of cells that you would like to merge.

    Image with example cell group in Excel

  2. Right click on the selected area and click Format Cells.

    Options menu with highlight on Format Cells option

  3. Click the Alignment tab at the top of the pop-up menu.

    Red outline around alignment tab in Excel format menu

  4. In the Alignment tab, open the Horizontal dropdown and select Center Across Selection.

    Highlight of center across selection option in Horizontal dropdown

  5. Click OK to finalize and the cells will appear merged.

    Example of finished headline