How to Start a New Line in an Excel Cell

What this guide covers

• How do you start a new line in an Excel cell on Windows?
• Why does Alt + Enter not work in Excel for Mac?
• How do you add a line break inside an Excel formula?
• How do you add line breaks after every comma in a column?
• How do you remove line breaks from a whole column?
• How do you split a cell at its line breaks?
• Why is my Excel line break not showing?
• Why do line breaks disappear on import, export, or CSV?
• Does Alt + Enter work in Excel for the web?
• Frequently asked questions

A line break inside a cell is the difference between an address that reads like an address and one that runs off the edge of the column. It is also the fastest way to keep notes, task lists, and label text tidy without adding extra columns or merging cells.

The reason it trips people up is that Enter means something else in Excel. Enter commits the cell and moves down. To break the line without leaving the cell you need a modifier key, and the right modifier is different on Windows and Mac.

How do you start a new line in an Excel cell on Windows?

Press Alt + Enter while the cell is in edit mode. That inserts a line break at the cursor and leaves you inside the same cell.

1. Double-click the cell, or select it and press F2, to enter edit mode.
2. Click the exact spot where the text should break.
3. Press Alt + Enter. The cursor drops to a second line inside the cell.
4. Keep typing, then press Enter once to commit the whole cell.

A common use is an address. Type the street, break the line, type the city, break again, then type the state and ZIP. All three lines live in one cell, so sorting and filtering still treat it as a single record.

You can press Alt + Enter as many times as you like in one cell, and you can use it to skip a line by pressing it twice in a row, which leaves a blank line between blocks of text.

Rule to remember: Alt + Enter breaks the line, plain Enter ends the cell.

Tip: Turn on Wrap Text for the cell from the Home tab, Alignment group. Without it, Excel stores the break but may not show it. Microsoft documents the same shortcut in its official guide to starting a new line of text inside a cell.

Why does Alt + Enter not work in Excel for Mac?

Because Mac keyboards do not have an Alt key in the Windows sense, and Excel for Mac has changed the mapping across versions. The shortcut that works in every recent build is Control + Option + Return.

Two things make this look broken when it is not. First, if the cell is not in edit mode the shortcut does nothing at all, so double-click the cell before you try. Second, if Wrap Text is off, Excel inserts the break but shows the cell on one line, which reads as failure.

If none of the three shortcuts work, use a formula instead. CHAR(10) behaves identically on Mac and Windows, so it is the version-proof option.

Rule to remember: on Mac, start with Control + Option + Return and make sure the cell is in edit mode first.

How do you add a line break inside an Excel formula?

Use CHAR(10) in place of the break. CHAR(10) is the line feed character, and Excel renders it as a line break as soon as Wrap Text is on.

Example: =A2 & CHAR(10) & B2 & CHAR(10) & C2

Each CHAR(10) drops the next value onto its own line. The ampersand does the joining, CHAR(10) does the breaking.

Rule to remember: CHAR(10) inserts the break, Wrap Text reveals it. You need both.

How do you join several cells with line breaks using TEXTJOIN?

The ampersand approach gets unwieldy once you are joining more than three or four values. TEXTJOIN takes the delimiter once and applies it across a whole range, so it scales much better when you add more cells.

1. Choose the cells to join. Say you want to combine A1, A2, and A3 into one stacked block of text.

2. Enter the formula: =TEXTJOIN(CHAR(10), TRUE, A1:A3)

Each argument does one job:

• CHAR(10) is the delimiter, so it goes between every value.
• TRUE tells Excel to skip empty cells, which stops you from getting blank lines in the middle of the block.
• A1:A3 is the range being joined. Swap in any range or list of ranges.

3. Press Enter to commit the formula.

4. Turn on Wrap Text from the Home tab so the stacked result is visible.

Rule to remember: TEXTJOIN with CHAR(10) and TRUE builds a clean stacked list and drops the blanks for you.

What is the difference between CHAR(10) and CHAR(13) in Excel?

CHAR(10) is a line feed and CHAR(13) is a carriage return. Modern Excel on both Windows and Mac uses CHAR(10) for in-cell line breaks. CHAR(13) will not produce a visible break on its own, and it often shows up as a small box or an invisible character that quietly breaks lookups and matches.

This matters when you clean data. If you strip CHAR(10) but not CHAR(13), the stray carriage returns stay behind and your VLOOKUP keeps failing on values that look identical.

Rule to remember: build with CHAR(10), clean for both CHAR(10) and CHAR(13).

How do you add line breaks after every comma in a column?

Use Find and Replace with Ctrl + J, which is how you type an invisible line break into the Replace field. This turns a column of comma-separated text into a column of stacked lists in one pass.

1. Select the range you want to reformat.

2. Open Find and Replace with Ctrl + H on Windows or Command + H on Mac.

3. In the Find what field, type the character you are breaking after, for example a comma followed by a space.

4. In the Replace with field, press Ctrl + J. The field will look empty apart from a faint blinking dot. That dot is the line break.

5. Click Replace All. Excel inserts a break after every match in the selection.

6. Turn on Wrap Text for the range so the new lines display.

If you would rather not touch the source data, the formula version does the same thing non-destructively: =SUBSTITUTE(A2,", ",CHAR(10))

Rule to remember: Ctrl + J is the only way to type a line break into a Find and Replace box, and the box will look empty when you do.

How do you remove line breaks from a whole column?

This is the opposite problem, and it is the one that usually arrives with imported data. Text pasted from a website, a PDF, or an exported system often carries line breaks you never asked for, and they break sorting, lookups, and anything downstream that expects a single-line value.

There are three ways to strip them, and they are not interchangeable.

The formula route. Put this in a helper column and fill down:

=TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2,CHAR(13),""),CHAR(10)," "))

The inner SUBSTITUTE removes stray carriage returns, the outer one turns line feeds into spaces, and TRIM collapses the double spaces that leaves behind. Copy the helper column and paste it back over the original as values when you are happy with the result.

The Find and Replace route. Select the range, press Ctrl + H, click into the Find what field and press Ctrl + J, leave Replace with empty or type a single space, then click Replace All. This is faster on large sheets but it is destructive, so work on a copy.

Watch out for CLEAN. CLEAN removes the break without leaving anything in its place, so "New York" over "NY" becomes "New YorkNY". If word boundaries matter, use SUBSTITUTE with a space instead.

Rule to remember: SUBSTITUTE puts a space back, CLEAN does not. Pick based on whether the words need separating.

How do you split a cell at its line breaks?

Sometimes the stacked cell is the problem and you need each line in its own cell. Two options, depending on your Excel version.

TEXTSPLIT, available in Microsoft 365 and Excel 2024, does it in one formula:

• Split down into rows: =TEXTSPLIT(A2,,CHAR(10))
• Split across into columns: =TEXTSPLIT(A2,CHAR(10))

Note the double comma in the first version. The second argument is the column delimiter, which we are leaving empty, and the third is the row delimiter.

Text to Columns works in every version. Select the column, go to Data > Text to Columns, choose Delimited, click Next, tick Other, then click into the little box and press Ctrl + J. The box looks empty, which is expected. Click Finish and each line lands in its own column.

Rule to remember: Ctrl + J is the line break wherever Excel asks you to type a delimiter, including Text to Columns.

Why is my Excel line break not showing?

In almost every case the break is there and Excel is just not displaying it. Work through these in order.

1. Wrap Text is off. This is the cause roughly nine times out of ten. Select the cell and click Home > Wrap Text. You can also open Format Cells with Ctrl + 1 and tick Wrap text on the Alignment tab.
2. The row height is fixed. If you or a template previously set an exact row height, Excel will not grow the row to fit the extra lines. Double-click the boundary below the row number to reset it to autofit, or right-click the row number, choose Row Height, and set a value that fits.
3. Vertical alignment is hiding it. If the cell is bottom-aligned in a tall row the first line can sit out of view. Set alignment to Top from the Home tab.
4. The cell is merged. Merged cells do not autofit row height at all. Excel will store the break and refuse to grow the row. Use Center Across Selection instead of Merge and Center.
5. The cell is formatted as Text and the value came from a formula. Change the format to General and re-enter the formula, otherwise Excel displays the formula string rather than its result.
6. You used CHAR(13) instead of CHAR(10). Carriage returns do not render as breaks in current Excel. Swap to CHAR(10).

Rule to remember: if the break will not show, check Wrap Text first and row height second. Those two account for nearly every case.

Why do line breaks disappear on import, export, or CSV?

A line break inside a cell is legal in a CSV file, but only if the whole field is wrapped in quotation marks. Excel does that correctly when it saves, so an Excel to Excel round trip through CSV usually survives. The trouble starts when something else reads the file.

• Tools that split on the newline character treat your one record as two rows. Import scripts, older accounting systems, and quick command-line splits all do this. If the destination cannot handle quoted multi-line fields, strip the breaks before you export using the SUBSTITUTE approach above.
• Pasting into a plain text field drops the break or converts it to a space, because the receiving field only accepts one line.
• Text arriving from Windows systems carries CHAR(13) plus CHAR(10) together. Excel shows the CHAR(10) part as a break and leaves the CHAR(13) sitting invisibly in the cell, which is why the value looks right but will not match anything.
• Copying between Excel and Google Sheets is generally reliable in both directions, but check the wrap setting on the receiving side before you assume the break was lost.

Rule to remember: if the receiving system cannot read quoted multi-line CSV fields, replace the breaks with a separator such as a semicolon before exporting.

Does Alt + Enter work in Excel for the web?

Usually, yes. Alt + Enter inserts a line break in Excel for the web in most browsers. The failure cases are browsers or operating systems that grab the combination first, and some Chromebook and Linux setups where the key is intercepted before Excel sees it.

If the shortcut is being swallowed, you have two dependable fallbacks: build the value with a CHAR(10) formula, which works identically in the browser, or open the workbook in the desktop app to do the typing and then carry on in the browser.

Rule to remember: CHAR(10) is the shortcut-free path, and it behaves the same in Excel for the web, Windows, and Mac.

Excel line breaks at a glance

Alt + Enter on Windows, Control + Option + Return on Mac, CHAR(10) in formulas, Ctrl + J anywhere Excel asks you to type a delimiter, and Wrap Text to make any of it visible. Those five cover essentially every in-cell line break job.

Working in Google Sheets instead? The shortcut is different there, so see our companion guide on how to insert a new line in a Google Sheets cell.

You can browse more step by step Excel guides on the blog, or pick up ready-made Excel templates that already have the formatting handled. We also post short walkthroughs on the Simple Sheets YouTube channel.

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