Can Google Sheets Add a New Line in a Cell? Yes! Here’s How

If you’ve been asking yourself “Can Google Sheets add a new line in a Cell?” The short answer is yes. In this tutorial, I will show you a few ways you can use to add a new line in the same cell in Google Sheets. This can be done manually (if you’re typing and need to add a new line), or you can use a formula as well.

The simplest way is to simply use the keyboard combination Alt + Enter.

Need more help? Let’s dive into a more in-depth look.

Manually Add a New Line in the Same Cell (Keyboard Shortcut)

If you’re manually entering data in Google Sheets, you can use the below keyboard shortcut to add a new line in the same cell.

ALT + ENTER (hold the alt key and then press the Enter key)

Below are the steps to use this in a cell to go to a new line:

1. Double-click on the cell in which you want to add a line break (or select it and then press F2).
2. Place the cursor where you want to insert the line break
3. Hold the ALT key and then press the Enter key (or Cmd+ Enter if you’re using a Mac)

The above steps would add a new line, and you will see the cursor in the next line.

Related: How To Insert a Diagonal Line in Google Sheets

Replace a Character with a Line Break in Google Sheets

Using the keyboard shortcut to easily insert line breaks is fine if you manually enter the data. But with large datasets, you can also use the help of a simple formula to add line breaks across multiple cells.

Suppose you have a dataset, as shown below, where there are addresses that have a comma separating parts of it. If you want to remove this comma and replace this with a line break (so that each part of it is in a new line), you can do that using the substitute formula.

To use the substitute formula to create new lines in the above example, you’d have to:

1. Type =SUBSTITUTE( into the cell B2
2. Select the cell with the data we’d like to change. In this case, it would be A2
3. Type a comma, then “, “ to indicate that we want to substitute out the comma from the data
4. Type another comma and enter CHAR(10)), which indicates we want to use line breaks and closes the formula.
5. Press Enter

The entire formula will look like this:

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

The above formula looks for the comma in the text in the cell and replaces it with CHAR(10), which is the ASCII code for a line break.

For this formula to give you the expected result (where each part of the address is in a new line in the same cell), you need to ensure that the wrap text for these cells is enabled (the cells where you have used the formula).

To enable wrap text, click the “Formatting” option in the menu and click on “Text wrapping” –> “Wrap.”

Related: How To Make an Indent in Google Sheets

Can Google Sheets Add a New Line in a Cell on Mobile?

Unfortunately, you can’t insert line breaks in mobile very easily. The only way to do it is to write it as a formula with the CHAR function operator and have each text line in quotes. For example, to move the “Morning” from Good Morning into a second line within a cell, like in our first example, you would use the function like so:

="Good"&CHAR10&"Morning"

So there are two quick ways to add a new line in the same cell in Google Sheets. If you only have a few cells where you need to do this, you can use the Control + Enter method, or else you can try the formula method.

We hope this answers your question, “Can Google Sheets add a new line in a cell?” If you found this article useful, check out the best Google Sheets courses to bolster your skill set.

Other Google Sheets tutorials you may like:

• How To Autofit Column Width in Google Sheets
• How To Hide Gridlines in Google Sheets
• How To Keep Leading Zeros in Google Sheets
• Add Subscript and Superscript in Google Sheets
• How To Combine Cells in Google Sheets