Now let's take a look at a formatting option that's better than merge.
Now you might ask what's wrong with merge.
Why do we need something that's better?
Well, there is no problem with merge
if you use it as your report headers and in places where you don't need to add formulas. But using merge
and center is going to cause problems when you write formulas.
Here I have the salary information for three different divisions.
Let's say I wanted to get the total salary right here.
I have nothing merged inside this data set.
The only thing that's currently merged is the title here.
So I'm just going to write the usual sum formula.
I'm going to reference this area, close bracket, press enter.
That's my total salary for all three divisions.
Easy, right?
Not so easy
if we had merged cell. So let me just remove this.
Now let's go to productivity and let's merge this because this looks much more organized, much better.
We can do the same for the other ones but let's just do it for productivity. And let's go back to writing
our formula. Now check what happens.
I can't select column C. So the moment it comes to here, this expands. The work around for this is to
actually type the formula in. So this would be C6 till C43, close bracket, press enter.
Which can be a pain to do.
Then in addition to this being a pain you can also end up writing formulas that are wrong because you
might not notice that there was a merged cell or a few merged cells in between your data and you ended
up highlighting more than what you wanted.
So if you need to merge cells you can do it using Center Across Selection. Because the advantage of using
this instead of using merge is that you don't run into this problem when you write formulas. And the looks
of your report is going to be identical as if you'd merged it.
So let's see how we can set this up.
So I'm just going to click this again to turn off merge.
Now the first step to using center across selection is to highlight the area.
So basically the same step you would do before you click on merge. Instead of click on merge,
we're going to right mouse click, go to format cells, or use the shortcut key Control+1. Go to alignment, from
the text alignment options here, select Center Across Selection and click on OK.
Exact same effect but check what the difference is, each cell is separate,
nothing has been merged. The text that we see here is actually sitting in this cell. It just looks like
it's sitting on top of these other two cells.
So if you wanted to write this formula from scratch we can. Center cross selection is not going to give
us any problems. Now we can apply this to the other headers as well.
Just double click the former painter,
apply it to this one and apply to this one, escape to reset.
OK, so whenever you come to merging cells and you think it might impact your formulas, use center across
selection instead.