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Watch this short video, to see the steps for adding a line break in a cell. Type Ctrl+J (that will replace anything that you previously typed in Find).Press the Tab key - that will select the Find What box, and anything that is entered there.Click on the Replace tab - you’ll see a light border around the word.Be sure that you aren’t inserting more than one line break in the Find box - the Find box looks empty after you type Ctrl+J, so it is easy to accidentally type in there again.Or, try the next tip - you might have extra line breaks in the Find box. Try doing this find and replace when you first open Excel, before using the Find box for any other searches.If the Excel file has never been saved, try saving the file before doing this find and replace.
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To find a line break, and replace it with a space character, follow these steps. Why does that work? A line break is character 10 in the ASCII character set, and the Ctrl + J shortcut is the ASCII control code for character 10. Instead of using Alt + Enter, you can use a special shortcut to enter a line break in the Find What box: Ctrl + J Excel won’t let you put that shortcut into the Find What box. However, if you try to type Alt + Enter in the Find What box, you’ll just hear a beep from your computer. To find specific text in Excel, you can use Ctrl + F to open the Find and Replace dialog box. Line breaks are easy to add, but a little trickier to remove.
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But how can you find and replace line breaks in Excel? You can put one or more line breaks in a cell, to make the contents easier to read.
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When you want to create a line break (line feed) in a cell, you press Alt + Enter, to start a new line.
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