One Instance When Merging Cells Is Needed!

I am a HUGE advocate of not merging cells as they can cause all sorts of headaches while copying/pasting and running VBA code. I even went as far as to develop a free add-in to add a better solution (Centering Across) to the Excel Ribbon. However, I did run into a scenario where it made sense to take on the potential risks and merge some cells.

One Problem With Centering Across

While dealing with a workbook that was set up similar to the below screenshot, to save space I decided to collapse my monthly columns and just show my Quarterly/Yearly figures (that’s all that matters in Corporate America anyways, am I right?!).

But when I collapsed my columns, my header text disappeared! Now for a while, I was extremely confused as to why this was occurring, it just didn’t make sense to me…

I later found out that my header text was disappearing due to the fact that I was using the Center Across alignment format instead of the Merge & Center format.

When I went ahead and merged the header, collapsing the columns did not force the text to disappear. 

Here was the final setup for my data and as you can see is much easier to see all the different sections without scrolling to the right.

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Chris Newman

Chris is a finance professional and Excel MVP recognized by Microsoft since 2016. With his expertise, he founded TheSpreadsheetGuru blog to help fellow Excel users, where he shares his vast creative solutions & expertise. In addition, he has developed over 7 widely-used Excel Add-ins that have been embraced by individuals and companies worldwide.