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  Quick Excel Tips: How to Put a Carriage Return in your Cells

This particular tips comes from the fact that I’ve been asked this question several times now in the last few days alone, so I thought it would be a good idea to post it here: How do you put a Carriage Return in-between lines of text in a single cell? In other words, how do you use the Enter key like you would in Microsoft Word?

The answer to this is simple: Use Alt + Enter. When typing in your cell and you want to create a blank line before the next line of text starts, hold down the Alt key and press Enter. This will insert a blank line (like in Word) instead of shifting the focus to the next cell.


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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Office Help. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

17 Responses to “Quick Excel Tips: How to Put a Carriage Return in your Cells”

  1. Adam D Says:
    September 27th, 2006 at 6:35 pm

    Wow… great tip. Didn’t I teach you this trick when you were under my tutelage? Thank goodness we have such a great resource in your website Kev. (note: I’m being sarcastic)

  2. administrator Says:
    September 27th, 2006 at 10:37 pm

    Scathing! We can’t all be the Masters of Excel that you are adam =p.

  3. Michael Penland Says:
    January 23rd, 2009 at 4:30 pm

    For so long, I’ve wondered - thanks!

  4. Claire Says:
    June 24th, 2009 at 11:39 pm

    Fantastic! I have wanted to know how to do this for soooo long!

  5. pirate Says:
    July 23rd, 2009 at 1:29 pm

    THANK YOU!!!!!

  6. Fiona Says:
    July 30th, 2009 at 4:00 pm

    Really, really useful. I’ve always wanted to know how to do this!

  7. Murray Says:
    September 16th, 2009 at 9:38 pm

    This doesn’t seem to work on Mac version of excel? Any ideas?

  8. Mike Says:
    October 9th, 2009 at 10:09 am

    Command + Option + Enter will work on the Mac version.

  9. Curt Simon Says:
    May 3rd, 2010 at 10:15 am

    This isn’t working for me. I am typing a formula in J2 where G2 and H2 are cells =(G2&” “&&H2).
    Wen I type the alt/enter a new line is created and the formula looks good but in the cell both H2 and G2 appear on the same line

  10. Mac Minette Says:
    June 21st, 2011 at 11:53 pm

    Thanks for the info, and especially thanks to Mike, because I needed help to do this on the Mac Excel version.

  11. ANN Says:
    October 28th, 2011 at 1:28 am

    thanq!
    that was a great help :)

  12. Jerry Says:
    November 12th, 2011 at 10:55 pm

    I have needed to know how do that for so long — Ty so much! I couldn’t even find it in Excel help. Is there a combo of keystrokes to create superscript, other than Cntrl 1 etc?

  13. Cheryl Says:
    November 14th, 2011 at 4:50 pm

    Thank you everyone for your assistance. I could not find instruction for doing this in Excel for MAC. Why couldn’t they have used the same keystrokes? I don’t expect an answer to that one.

  14. Delois Kakeh Says:
    December 8th, 2011 at 7:14 am

    Couldnt be written any better. Reading this post reminds me of my old room mate! He always kept talking about this. I will forward this article to him. Pretty sure he will have a good read. Thanks for sharing!

  15. Nancy Says:
    February 6th, 2012 at 12:00 pm

    Yes, thanks! I could not find the combination. I guess I did this more on a PC back in the day so I thought it was one key initially. But now I have a Mac and needed more of a combination. I did try shift combinations because of the return in Word (as opposed to paragraph), but no dice. Thanks again.

  16. Greg Says:
    February 7th, 2012 at 9:12 am

    Thanks for this - just love the web for useful information and especially those who put it on here.Cheers, Greg

  17. Ken Says:
    February 9th, 2012 at 5:12 pm

    If you need to add a carriage return in a formula you can use…

    =A1&CHAR(10)&A2
    or
    =CONCATENATE(A1,CHAR(10),A2)

    The destination cell has to have word wrap on…
    Thought it might help…

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