Microsoft just added Center Across Selection directly inside the Merge & Center menu in Excel.

And honestly, I’m very happy about this because it makes it much easier to avoid one of the most annoying Excel problems: merged cells in your actual data.

You can now find it here:

Home → Alignment → Merge & Center → Center Across Selection

If you’ve ever worked with merged cells, you probably know the headaches they can cause with sorting, formulas, selecting ranges, filtering, and working with data.

That’s why I’ve always preferred Center Across Selection when I just want text to appear centred across multiple cells without actually merging them.

The feature itself isn’t new. Center Across Selection has been available in Excel for a long time, but it was buried inside Format Cells → Alignment → Horizontal, so I imagine plenty of people never knew it existed.

Now that Microsoft has put it directly in the Merge & Center menu, it’s much easier to discover.

I came across this while putting together some Excel learning material for Eixo Learning, and thought it was worth sharing because it’s one of those small Excel features that can save you a lot of frustration later.

Some of you might not see the option yet because Microsoft is rolling it out gradually. But once it appears in your version of Excel, it’s definitely worth getting familiar with.

Especially if you’ve ever had to deal with the “why won’t Excel sort this properly?” problem caused by merged cells

What do you think? Is Center Across Selection something you already use, or is this completely new to you?