Just got an email asking how to ‘unmerge cells without losing data’. I’m telecommuting today, so I can’t see the specific problem; but I think I’ve had the same thing happen.
Lick on merged cells. Click Unmerge. A warning pops up that says something like ‘This will only keep the top left data’, or something like that.
How does one unmerge cells in Excel, and keep all of the data?
I think you lose data when you merge cells. If you have a group of 2x2 cells with the data:
A B
C D
and you merge those cells into 1, you get a warning that you will lose data, and if you do ignore the warning, the remaining data is “A”. If you then unmerge, all except the top left cell are empty – but the data loss occurred earlier.
Bummer. Is there any way around that?
Concatenate the data from the cells you’re about to merge into the leftmost cell? You could write a macro to do that.
Let’s try posting when I’m not connected to VPN…
I’m not an Excel expert, so I wouldn’t be able to write a Macro. (And my coworker wouldn’t either.)
I’m not clear one something though: Aren’t merged cells by definition concatenated?
Merging cells adds the physical cells together, it doesn’t automatically concatenate anything.
To merge cells you need to make sure that everything you want is in the top left cell and the others are empty. If this is happening every now and then you can just manually move the data. If it’s a bigger task than that, macro’s aren’t hard to learn.
It might be easier if you could find out what the specific problem is.
I may be over simplifying things, but if you had a column that had for example…
John Smith in column A
If I wanted to separate it into 2 columns, I would make sure there was an empty column and then I would select Column A and then choose Data, text to columns and choose how it is delineated and I would be set.
How does one unmerge cells in Excel, and keep all of the data?
I don’t think that this is a well-defined problem. When you unmerge some merged cells, all the contents are placed in the cell in the upper left corner. What data is lost? None. If the problem is really about splitting up a string that is in one cell to place the split-up contents in separate cells, that’s not really unmerging cells.
I haven’t seen this particular file, but I’ve come across it before. (I don’t remember what I did before. I don’t know if Text-to-data works.) There are cells that are merged. Highlight the merged cell and click Unmerge. Everything disappears except what was originally in the top-left cell.
I’ll have to see if I can have a look at the file tomorrow.
When you merge two cells to create a top border, you have merged two COLUMNS. Go to two columns that aren’t merged, highlight them and click the paintbrush icon - then bring your mouse over to the two merged columns to reformat them, also highlighting with the mouse. This action should allow you to keep the data and move about in Excel Hell. Your data will be left centered in the left column. Hope that helps!
Whatever data was in the merged cell will still be in the unmerged cell. As mentioned above, any deletion of data happens when you merge the cells not when you unmerge them.
Is it possible that the data is hidden because the resulting column is too narrow to display it?
Update: Didn’t see the file today. I’ll report back when I do.