How To Line Break In Google Sheets

In this tutorial, you will learn how to line break in google sheets.

If you’ve ever tried to add a line break within a cell in Google Sheets, you know it’s not as easy as it is in a text editor. Simply hitting enter on your keyboard exits edit mode, instead of adding a line break. So what do you do if you want to add a line break in Google Sheets? Fortunately there are a couple of handy features you can use to quickly add a line break anywhere in your cells. Read on to learn more.

Add a Line Break with Keyboard Shortcuts

The fastest way to add a line break is using the keyboard shortcut. This allows you to continue entering data without interrupting your flow. Here’s how:

Step 1

Select the cell you want to add a line break to and type in the text you want before the line break, then type CTRL+ENTER on your keyboard to insert a line break. Keep typing to add text after the line break.

Step 2

You can also add line breaks to cells that already have text in them. Simply double click on the cell to edit it then move your cursor to the desired location and CTRL+ENTER to insert the new line

Add a Line Break with Formulas

In some cases, text has to be automatically generated using formulas, making the manual method of adding line breaks unusable. For these cases, the formula method can be used instead.

Follow these steps to add line breaks to your formulas:

Step 1

For this example, we’ll use a simple text generating formula that counts the number of cells containing text in column A and outputs the number with a text label. The formula is: “=”Filled cells in Column A: ” & COUNTA(A:A)”

Step 2

To add line breaks to this formula, we combine the existing text with the CHAR(10) function, which generates a line break character. This function can be joined with any string using the standard string joining operator, the ampersand: &. So if we want to put the number calculated by the COUNTA() function on its own line, the formula would look like this: “=”Filled cells in Column A: ” & CHAR(10) & COUNTA(A:A)”.

Step 3

Note that you can add as many CHAR(10) functions to a formula as you want. For example, adding “& CHAR(10) & CHAR(10) &” to a formula will add 2 line breaks in a row, adding a blank line between paragraphs.

Summary

Example Spreadsheet: Make a copy of the example spreadsheet

In this tutorial, I covered how to line break in google sheets. Want more? Check out all the Google Sheets Tutorials.