Wrap Text & Merge and Centre

Wrap Text

Microsoft Excel can wrap text so it appears on multiple lines in a cell. You can format the cell so the text wraps automatically, or enter a manual line break. But this will prevent you from a cell potentially taking up too much room on your worksheet. 

With the cell selected  "wrap text" can be enabled from the "home" tab:

Using Wrap text

First select the cell or cells you with to add "wrap text" to:

Then click the wrap text button:

As you can see the text has been pushed onto multiple lines instead of remaining very long and on one line. Sometimes you will receive an excel file in which someone has already applied this, therefore simply highlight all cells with CTRL + A and then deselect the box to revert everything back to standard. Its always preferential to widen column widths than it is to use wrap text 

Merge and Centre

Microsoft Excel can use a tool called merge and centre to expand a cell's edges to incorporate surrounding cells. This can be used to make buttons or titles or for any other reason you might need to:

Example

Here you can see a good example on the UK Metropolitan police data taken from the Data.police.uk website:    

If you wish to create a similar parameters then you can use Merge and Centre to do so.

how to use merge and centre

First decide the cell/s you wish to merge with others: 

Click and drag around the cell you wish to merge including the cell you wish to merge to:

In the Home tab of the menu ribbon, click the "Merge and centre" button: 

You may well want to mid-vertical align it too so that the text appear vertically central too:

This will make the text a little clearer and easier to read: