Merged cells

Excel allows any contiguous, rectangular selection of cells to be merged into a single cell. The merged cell contains only the value or formula which originally existed in the upper, left-most cell in the selection. If any of the other cells contained information, it is discarded when they are merged.

There are good things to be said about the ability to merge cells. It allows cells to be merged vertically as well as horizontally; that can be handy when producing headings down the left side of a table that relate to several rows. And it harmonizes the facilities of Excel with that of Word’s tables.

•	Highlight a rectangular range of cells that includes some merged cells, and the selection will automatically be enlarged so that it includes the whole of the merged area. It is impossible to select a smaller area.

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You can select an entire column or row by clicking on its header. But if the column or row intersects any merged cells, those cells get selected too. That can be tiresome; in particular, it stops the Insert rows and Insert columns commands from working. (OAK provides its own Insert and Delete commands which gets round this.)

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You can select an entire column or row with the keyboard: Ctrl+Space selects the column, Shift+Space the row. But if the column or row intersects any merged cells, those cells get selected too, along with the entire columns or rows that they in turn intersect. In most circumstances that renders the ability to select rows and columns with the keyboard unusable. This is particularly confusing if the merged cells happen to be hidden.

•	Text that won't fit in a cell is usually able to spill out into its neighbors, so long as they are unoccupied. In a merged cell, however, the text is truncated.

•	Unlike every other cell formatting option, the merging of cells is not simply a characteristic of a format style; it actually changes the regular grid structure of your spreadsheet.

Avoiding using the merged cell facility is no hardship, since another command is available which dates back to earlier versions of Excel that didn't support cell merging. It is the option "center across selection", which can be reached from the Alignment option offered by the Format Cells command (shortcut Ctrl+1). It produces a cosmetic effect that is similar in many cases to merging cells, without any of the drawbacks. (Exception: merging cells works horizontally and vertically. Center across selection is useful for horizontal groups of cells only.)

We recommend users of Excel to favor the center across cells facility over merging cells, and actively to reverse any cell merging in existing spreadsheets. The only problem is that the cells that have been merged in a spreadsheet are hard to find; there's nothing to identify them. That's why one of the search selection options offered by OAK is one that picks out the cells that have been merged in a worksheet.