How to Get Multiple Lines in a Cell

0:00 All right, so you want to have multiple lines in a cell. I'm gonna show you two ways to do this, one, a real way, and two, a fake way. This is gonna be really fun Because I have used this a lot, uh, in displaying data in a spreadsheet form. We have rows, we have columns. Sometimes we want more rows than columns, sometimes we want less rows than columns. And here we have, like, a schedule. I'm gonna do one thing, which is I'm gonna copy this. So I have Suzanne and Frank here, and of course, we could do Suzanne and Frank in one cell, but we wanna take up this whole maybe four lines or three lines, multiple lines, and we wanna make it one cell. So I'm gonna copy Suzanne and Frank. Now, I'm also going to go up to this menu bar , and I'm going to merge .

0:49 This is these two arrows sort of pointing at each other. It's Merge Cells . I'm gonna merge all of those cells . It's going to say, "Merging cells will only preserve the top leftmost value. Do I wanna merge anyway?" Yes. Why this message comes up-- I'm gonna hit Cancel first. Why this message comes up is because I have three different cells with da- data in it. If I have nothing in there, let's do these three cells or four cells and do exactly the same thing. It just does it, done, merged. Google Sheets is trying to save me the trouble of getting rid of this data, but I'm just gonna hit Command + C and copy it. So let's take all four of these lines. Hit that again, Merge Cells. It's gonna have the exact same heads-up.

1:34 I'm gonna hit OK. And you see it did have only Suzanne, but I'm gonna paste Suzanne and Frank in there. I'm also going to need to horizontally align and vertically align, and I might have to change my text, uh, to be maybe bigger. Those are all stylistic choices you can make. But now you know how to merge those and keep that content in there. But if you're like, "Hey, I merged. I would need to write Suzanne and Frank. Uh, I don't, I don't want that. I want, I want the-- each of those words to be on a new line." Okay. Go between Suzanne and "and," h- uh, hold down Command and hit Enter. Go between "and" and Frank, h- hold down Command, hit Enter, and there you go. You got three lines inside of four rows here, essentially, or four cells all merged together.

2:19 Okay. That's the real way. Let me show you the fake way. I'm gonna undo all of that. I'm gonna undo everything. And here we have three lines, and we're like, "Okay, those three lines, we wanna be together visually." But right now, they do not look together visually. They're three separate cells . I need to go up to View up in the top left corner, go to Show, and uncheck Grid Lines. And you're like, "Well, okay, we got rid of grid lines. Now what?" Well, now we take the three cells that are still the same cells . We haven't edited the cell in any way yet. I'm gonna take all three cells, I'm gonna highlight them, and instead of going to Merge, right next to it is Borders, and I'm gonna create a border. Uh, the border color normally is black.

3:05 I wanna do a little bit of a slate or silver color, and I do wanna keep it this same thickness. I'm setting this all up beforehand before I click Outer Borders. Okay? If you want to set the outer border and then set the colors, you have to click Outer Borders again. But I'm gonna do all of this set up beforehand, and now I'm gonna click Outer Border only. Not all borders, not inner borders. I'm not gonna have to click left, right, up, and down. I just do outer borders, and we click away, and we see that our Suzanne and Frank are now visually all in one cell. I haven't changed the text, I haven't changed it to one cell. I just make it a border.

3:50 Same with this Tom and Jerry. I can go here, border. The f- the, uh, same style that I had before is saved. Just hit click Outer Border instead of All Borders. And there we go. We have multiple lines inside a cell in a sort of fake way. Now I can always go in and… Oh, I have to do Suzanne there, or Fred and Frank instead. There you go. Hopefully, that was fun for you to have multiple lines in a cell in a Google sheet. You are watching better sheets here on YouTube. Make sure you check out this video or this video and subscribe right now to get more tips, tricks, how tos, get more out of your Google sheets than you ever have before. I'm excited to be making a ton more videos here. Ask me questions down in the comments and I will answer them in future videos.

4:36 But for right now, right here, one of these videos is gonna be your next Google sheet.