Creating multiple lines in an Excel cell

To be honest, this tip is probably more for me so that I remember and don’t forget how it works. 🙂 There are times when I want to have multiple lines in a spreadsheet cell, and not just lines that wrap around. To get that hard linefeed, you just have to use ALT-Enter, and you’ll have a new line in your cell. Here’s what that looks like…

In my example here, I have one line of text in my cell, but I want a second line. If I press the TAB key, I go to the next column, and the Enter key takes me to the next row. But here’s what happens when I use ALT-Enter:

Machine generated alternative text:
AutoSave . 
Bookl Excel 
Duff, Thomas 
File 
Home Insert Page Li Formuli Data Review View Help ACROB Team 
p Search 
Paste 
Clipboard 
Al 
Font 
Alignment 
äConditionaI Formatting • 
Format as Table • 
Number 
*cell styles 
Styles 
This is my first lin 
Cells 
Editing 
Ideas 
c 
his is my first line 
2 
3 
4 
5

I now have a second line that I can type into, and it shows up as I want:

Machine generated alternative text:
AutoSave . 
Bookl - Excel 
Duff, Thomas 
x 
File 
Home Insert Page Li Formuli Data Review View Help ACROB Team 
p Search g 
Paste 
Clipboard 
Al 
Font 
Alignment 
0/0 # Conditional Formatting • 
Format as Table • 
Number 
*cell styles 
Styles 
This is my first line 
and this is my second line 
Cells 
Editing 
Ideas 
c 
This is my first line 
and this is my second line 
2 
3 
4 
5

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