Get rid of merged cells! Debate

[erik.van.geit]

"Get rid of merged cells!"
That's what most of the experts try to tell us.
Why? They are so beautiful!!

If anyone wants to do an effort to explain "pro" or "contra", feel free to start the debate.
I opened this thread to avoid debates in UNMERGE and CENTER ACROSS
That thread has some code to do the job quickly.

It was a pleasure to work this out for Mr Excel community

kind regards,
Erik

 

[riaz]

If anyone wants to do an effort to explain "pro" or "contra", feel free to start the debate.

Bonjour Erik

Always pro. In fact, were it not for this board, I might have become anti, but now that I have learned a few tricks with merged cells, I use this a lot in my work. You can write lots and lots of lovely things in merged cells and make them look as you want. That, coupled with row heights, gives you clean paragraphs if you want to write oodles of text.

(Why anyone would want to write text using Excel is another debate for another day!)

Cheers

 

[Fazza]

No debate from me. Merged cells suck big time!! I bypass any forum posts that use merged cells and whenever I have to work with spreadsheets sent to me containing merged cells, they are deleted as the first modification to the file.

 

[riaz]

No debate but a request for clarification. Why?

 

[MrKowz]

Merged Cells + Visual Basic is like trying to divide by zero. When you try to do it, the world implodes on itself.

 

[Fazza]

hi, Riaz.

Why no merged cells - because merged cells are a total pain in the spreadsheet.

My use of spreadsheets is for working with data. So data in tables. Merged cells cause problems with selecting columns (or rows if vertically merged), filtering, running pivot tables, queries, joining tables together. Just about any useful work operation with the data. For this sort of work, merged cells are really unworkable.

Merged cells might be OK for some uses but none that I do in my strongly data/numeric-focussed work.

Regards, F

 

[riaz]

I agree with you, purely because on the odd occasion I have had to manipulate some sheets with merged cells, I had to unmerge, do the necessary, then merge them back, and it has been a pain in the neck.

Still, different strokes.... I would not be able to do some of what I do without merged cells. I suppose it all boils down to usage. That is not to say I use merged cells all the time, but one particular project requires this (we prepare financial statements for clients) where we need text and numbers. I merge cells where there are no numbers in columnar form, leave them unmerged for the columns of numbers, then merge the next lot and so on ad infinitum ad nauseum.

Anyway, I blame this forum. I learnt how to do this right here.

 

[Richard Schollar]

I agree with Fazza - you can always use an alternative to merged cells. Using them is just asking for trouble down the line.

 

[cornflakegirl]

Merged cells are just wrong!

Using them because they solve a real problem - maybe, just about. (Although why not just use a text box? ). But mostly when I see them, it's by people who are more concerned with formatting than being able to use the data - grrrr!

 

[riaz]

Merged cells are just wrong!

Using them because they solve a real problem - maybe, just about. (Although why not just use a text box? ). But mostly when I see them, it's by people who are more concerned with formatting than being able to use the data - grrrr!

Just like you would probably not buy a new car if it was dirty, we need to polish the final output after all the data crunching has happened in the background.

(so far, it looks like 7 against, 1 for. Help!)