Written by The New Paperclip on April 14, 2008 – 9:24 pm
Wonder how your favourite accountant/analyst/spreadsheet guru makes those cool looking headings that go across a number of columns and rows?
Chances are they are using a great feature of Excel 2007 called "Merge and Center". What does merge and center do? Exactly that - it merges all the cells you have selected, and then centres the text!
So how do you do it?
- Select the cells you want to merge
- In the ribbon menu (the one at the top) make sure you are on the "Home" tab, and then look in the "Alignment" section
- Select "Merge & Center"
Simple as that!
Have you selected multiple rows? Well you will notice that whilst the text will be horizontally centered… it will not be vertically centered. How do you fix that? Just near the "Merge & Center" button in the menu there are three buttons. One that has lines at the top, one that has lines in the middle, and one that has lines at the bottom (the one with lines at the bottom will be selected). Select the one with the lines in the middle - that will center the vertical alignment of your selection.
’till next time!
TNP 
tags: excel 2007, help, tutorial
A much better option is Center Across Selection, which gives the same visual result as Merge And Center, without the issues that merged cells can bring. Unfortunately, by the time we got the beta, it was too late to put Center Across Selection into the ribbon, so you have to open up the format cells dialog.
[...] Yesterday I told you all about how you can use Merge and Center to get some text to run across a number of columns, rows, or both. [...]