How to Add a Line Break in an Excel Cell

Pressing Enter in Excel moves to the next cell instead of starting a new line. To put an address or a note on several lines inside one cell, you need a different key combination.

Enter edit mode in the cell

Double-click the cell, or select it and press F2 (on a Mac laptop you may need Fn + F2). The cursor appears inside the text.

Place the cursor where the break should go

Click at the exact point in the text where the new line should begin, for example after the street name in "12 Elm Street Toronto". Any text to the right of the cursor will move down.

Press the line break shortcut

Press Alt + Enter (Mac: Ctrl + Option + Return, and Cmd + Option + Return also works). The text after the cursor moves to a new line inside the same cell. Press Enter to finish editing.

The cell now reads:

12 Elm Street
Toronto

Turn on Wrap Text if the lines do not show

Alt + Enter switches Wrap Text on for that cell on its own. If the cell still shows a single line, select it and click Home, Wrap Text in the Alignment group. The row height grows to fit unless it was set by hand; in that case, double-click the border below the row number to autofit.

Add a line break inside a formula

Use CHAR(10), which is the line feed character, and join it to the text with &:

=A2&CHAR(10)&B2

With "12 Elm Street" in A2 and "Toronto" in B2, the result shows the street on the first line and the city on the second, but only if Wrap Text is on for the formula cell. Without it, the two parts appear run together on one line with no visible gap.

To remove line breaks. Select the cells and press Ctrl + H (Mac: Ctrl + H as well). Click in the Find what box and press Ctrl + J, which inserts an invisible line break character. Type a space in Replace with and click Replace All. If Ctrl + J does nothing, which happens on some Mac versions, use =SUBSTITUTE(A2, CHAR(10), " ") in a spare column instead.