New Line in Excel Cell

If you use Word, you know that you can enter a new line by pressing the Enter key. But when you try this in Excel, you will notice that Excel treats it a little differently than Word.

Instead of adding a line break, it confirms the value or formula inside a cell and moves to the cell below.

But there is a way you can add a page break in the exact place.

Before you enter the page break, you have to activate the text wrapping option. You can find it in Home >> Alignment >> Wrap Text.

Now, Excel added automatic line breaks to fit the text inside the cell.

Now, make column A wider.

You can set the exact size where the text breaks or add a line break so it will break in the place you want. In our example, we want to break the line after the comma.

Click the cell and press F2. Move your cursor, using arrow keys, and place it before the second sentence.

Press Alt + Enter on Windows or ⌃ + ⌥ + Return on Mac.

It’s going to break the line exactly as we wanted.

New line in a formula

Let’s try something different. Instead of using a single cell, insert the two sentences into different cells, and then we are going to use a formula to concatenate them.

If you press Enter the two sentences and then press text wrapping, the cell is going to act the same way as before.

If you press Enter + Alt inside a formula, you are going to get the following result.

There is a new line inside the formula, but the result is the same.

There is a way to add a special character to a formula, to add a new line, not in a formula, but in the result of a formula.

This special character is line feed (LF). You can add it by using the CHAR function.

This is what the formula looks like.

The formula is intact, and there is a new line inside a cell.

Tomasz Decker is an Excel specialist, skilled in data analysis and financial modeling.