How to Start a New Line in an Excel Cell (The Easiest Way)

In this video tutorial you’ll see the easiest way how to start a new line in an Excel cell. You can easily divide a text of any length placed within one cell into several lines to make it all visible. We’ll also be talking about how to remove the entered line breaks and get the whole text into one line again.

Can we start?

Contents hide

1 How to use the hotkey Alt and Enter

2 How to use the hotkey Alt and Enter to divide a text that has already been entered in the cell

3 How to remove line breaks to make the text one line again

How to use the hotkey Alt and Enter

If you’d like to type a longer text in one cell and place some words at the beginning of a new line, but still within the same cell, the easiest way to do that is to use the hotkey Alt and Enter.

Let’s have a look at how it works using a specific example.

First, let’s click into the cell where we want to place the text. Then we can write the first part of the text, here it’ll be ‘How to’. Now it’s time to use the hotkey we’ve talked about, which is Alt and Enter.

And here we go – a new line to write into!

So, we’ll finish the text with ‘start a new line in an Excel Cell’.

Let’s hit Enter, and we can adjust the height and width of the cell as needed to make the whole text in both lines visible.

How to use the hotkey Alt and Enter to divide a text that has already been entered in the cell

We can use the same hotkey to divide a text that has already been entered in the cell. Let’s place the part ‘in an Excel Cell’ in a separate line, too.

We double-click to get inside the cell and set the cursor exactly where we want to enter a line break, in this case it’s before the word ‘in’.

Now press Alt and Enter and that’s all it takes!

Our text’s been divided into three lines! We can modify the cell height and width again according to what’s needed to make the whole text visible even now when we’ve added a new line within the cell.

How to remove line breaks to make the text one line again

But let’s move on now!

To remove this text layout and return to the one-line version of the text is no rocket science at all!

Just follow these steps!

Double-click into the cell again, set the cursor at the beginning of the line you want to cancel, and press the Backspace key.

The text has been moved one line up.

The same way we can remove a line up here, inside the Formula Bar.

We can click here on the downward arrow on the right to show all of the text and again.

Use Backspace to move this part of the text up to keep the whole thing in one line.

And there’s one important thing to note.

Even though we’ve cancelled the lines, which we can see up here in the Formula Bar, the line breaks seem to linger here in the spreadsheet. The reason behind this is that when we format a text this way, Excel automatically turns on text wrapping. The ‘Wrap Text’ feature is another, more advanced way how to make longer texts placed within one cell all visible. To see how it works, check out a separate tutorial by EasyClick Academy. The link to the video is in the description below.

Now, we simply turn text wrapping off by clicking on this button and the text shows in one line only, just as we wanted.

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