Add Line Break in Excel Formula

Add Line Break in Excel Formula

It’s easy to add a line break when you’re typing in an Excel worksheet. Just click where you want the line break, and press Alt + Enter. But how can you add a line break in an Excel formula?

Line Break in Excel Text

Here is an example of adding a line break in Excel text.

  • The cursor is positioned where the line break should be added.
  • Press Alt+Enter
  • Press Enter, to complete the entry and move to another cell

linebreak01

Wrap Text Added Automatically

When you press the Enter key to complete the entry, the line break appears, and Wrap Text is automatically added to the cell.

You might have to adjust the column width though, because the text won’t flow into the next column.

linebreak02

Add a Line Break in a Formula

It’s not quite as easy to add a line break in a formula, but it’s possible!
Here is a formula that shows text, combined with the sum of the values in C1:C6

=”Total amount is: ” & SUM(C1:C6)

Add Line Break in Excel Formula

To add a line break between the text and the total amount, use the Excel CHAR function, with the number 10. The “&” operator is included too,  to join the line break character to the other text in the formula.

=”Total amount is: ” & CHAR(10) & SUM(C1:C6)

linebreak04

Turn on Wrap Text

After you add the line break, and press Enter, you might see a strange little box, where the line break should be.

linebreak05

The Wrap Text feature isn’t automatically turned on, when you add a line break in a formula. You’ll have to turn it on yourself.

Select the cell with the line break in the formula, and on the Ribbon’s Home tab, click the Wrap Text command.

Then, you’ll see the line break in the cell, instead of the little square.

linebreak08

Video: Find and Replace Line Breaks

Watch this short video, to see the steps for adding a line break in a cell that contains. Then see how to find the line breaks in Excel, and replace them with space characters.

To get the Excel workbook, with the Add or Remove Line Breaks in a Cell in Excel example, go to the Excel Line Breaks page on my Contextures site.

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41 thoughts on “Add Line Break in Excel Formula”

    1. It works for me when i see in Excel. However, when i copy paste to Notepad, it adds a double quote in many areas. What should be done ? I use Office 365

      1. >It works for me when i see in Excel. However, when i copy paste to Notepad, it adds a double quote in many areas. What should be done ? I use Office 365

        This is an intended behaviour. Each cell content must be surrounded by quotes. Otherwise you wount have way to distinguish ‘internal’ break lines of cell/row break linkes.

  1. You read my mind !!!

    last week, in one of the LinkedIn Excel groups, someone posted a problem, which I offered to help, and part of my solution was to display concatenated cells that had at the end the CHAR(10), so the final text looked like one row per each cell included on the CONCATENATE.

    I did exactly as you said, and… well, it didn’t showed up the way I wanted to… Maybe I am missing something?

    1. you need to make sure that “wrap text” is enabled on that cell. Without this, the new line character is ignored.

  2. @Martin,

    You have to turn Word Wrap on for the cells you want to display multiple lines. You do this by calling up the “Cell Format” dialog box for those cells, click the Alignment tab and put a check mark in the “Wrap text” check box and then click OK.

  3. This is a very useful trick of excel. Thanks for sharing. My excel cell texts used to be very long before applying this technique.

  4. I want to display a day and time on two lines within a cell. I have dd-mmm and hh:mm I want to automatically wrap so that the day and month display above the hour and minute. Using the &CHAR(10)& code only creates an error window.
    8 Oct
    10:33
    Is the desired result.

  5. From another site the solution is to insert the line break command between the date and time, ^j (Do NOT type the carrot and “j”.) What needs to be done is hold the ctrl key town and hit the “j” key.
    Under custom formatting, I typed in
    d-mmm^jhh”:”mm
    And it worked! :o)

    1. I know this is old but it really helped a lot, especially once I figured out that I had to put it in the custom format box! Thanks

  6. Madam, I see your formules to insert in line formuules but I have one problems is that I type another words after formules the entire line not work

  7. Although this article is very old, it helped me a lot.
    Well done, Debra Dalgleish; my sincere regards.

      1. Dear Debra, you deserve to be thanked for your excellent work and helpful articles.
        I am looking for a solution to another requirement. I linked label of a graph to a cell which has a CONCATENATE formula to join contents of two cells. I want different font formatting (size and color) for two sections of the label. Kindly advise if it is possible with formulas.
        I viewed your profile in Linkedin and have sent you request to join.
        Best Regards
        Faheem

      2. @Faheem, thank you! You can’t change font formatting in a formula, but you could break the formula into multiple cells, based on the sections that you want coloured. Then, link those to separate text boxes on the chart, and format the text box font

  8. I have a formula that grabs data from page 1 in a workbook I have to create various printed results.
    =IF(ISBLANK(DATA!$C1),””,DATA!$G$1&DATA!$C1&DATA!$G$2)
    The result would be “AB12345C, where DATA!G1 would be AB, DATA!C1 would be 12345 and DATA!G2 would be C
    I want to insert a space between the C1 and G2 cells so that the result in the cell is this…
    AB
    12345C
    I have text wrapping on. I’ve tried to insert the “CHAR(10)” into various parts of the formula. Any questions?
    PS. Reason being for so many $ in the formula is that those cells are the prefix and suffix of a serial number generator I made, only one cell changes so this formula will be used multiple times with only one cell data varying.
    Any idea?

  9. I am trying to combine multiple lines into one cell.
    example. I have a table with different commands
    A1 [copy tftp startup-config]
    B1 [192.168.1.1]
    C1 [ ABC_192.168.1.2]
    D1 [startup-config]
    I want all of this information to end up in the E1 cell. The cell should look like this:
    copy tftp startup-config
    192.168.1.1
    ABC_192.168.1.2
    startup-config
    How using the CHAR(10) function can I accomplish this? I want all of this information vertically so that I can enter it into a Cisco switch.
    PLEASE HELP! I have pulled a lot of hair out.

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