
Tips.Net > ExcelTips Home > Editing > Automatically Breaking Text
Summary: Putting each line of a text string on its own line is easy if you know the trick. This tip explains how you can “break” text so that each word appears on its own line within a cell. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, and Excel 2003.)
Have you ever had a string in a cell that you wanted to wrap after every word? The normal way of doing this would be to press F2 and edit the string. You would delete each space and then press Alt+Enter to add a new line character.
There's an easier, less manual method of doing this, however--just use the SUBSTITUTE function. Suppose cell A1 contained "This is my text." Enter the following into another cell:
=SUBSTITUTE(A1," ",CHAR(10))
What this results in is the text of cell A1 with small boxes where the spaces were. Turn on wrapping for the cell (Format | Cells | Alignment tab | Wrap Text | OK), and each word appears on a different line, just as you wanted.
Tip #3060 applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 2000 2002 2003
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