Access  ¨  Excel  ¨ FrontPage ¨ Outlook ¨ PowerPoint ¨  Word ¨    Miscellaneous  ¨  Tutorials  ¨  Windows  ¨  Free Downloads

Carriage Return Within a Cell in Microsoft Excel

There's 3 ways to get a carriage return or paragraph return or line feed within a cell.

Method 1 - Cell Wrapping

Often, you need only set the cell to wrap text, and you can set the width of the cell to whatever is desired. Choose Format®Cells, Alignment tab, and check Wrap text.

This is the result:

Method 2 - Insert a Return

This one's a no-brainer. Just type the first line, hit Alt+Enter and type the second line. The result is virtually the same as above, however, if you copy and paste this to Word, for instance, you'll end up with a line break. Or if you export to CSV or other text format, you may get unexpected results.

Method 3 - Using a Formula

To use this, you must have wrap text selected. Here's a sample formula:

=a1&char(10)&a2

The results, again, are the same as above. However, if you forget to wrap text on the cell, you'll see this:

All contents copyright Anne Troy 2005-2006