Ctrl+Enter fills the selected cell range with the current entry. Shift+Enter completes a cell entry and selects the cell above. Cancels an entry in the cell or Formula Bar. Closes an open menu or submenu, dialog, or message window. Learn the basics of using Microsoft Excel for Mac, including the anatomy of a spreadsheet, how to enter data, how to make your data look good so it's easier.

How to stay in the same cell after pressing the Enter key in Excel?

Normally, when you finish the content in a cell and press Enter key, the cursor will be moved to the next cell by default. But, sometimes, you just need stay in the same cell after pressing the Enter key. This article, I will introduce you some quick tricks to solve this job in Excel.

Stay in the same cell after pressing the Enter key with Excel Options

In Excel, you can go to the Excel Options to set the option for changing the direction of the cursor after pressing the Enter key, please do as follows:

1. Click File > Options to go the Excel Options dialog.

2. In the Excel Options dialog box, click Advanced from the left pane, and in the right list box, under the Editing options section, uncheck After pressing Enter, move selection, see screenshot:

3. And then click OK button, from now on, when you enter the content into a cell and press Enter key, the input cell is still selected but not move.

Stay in the same cell after pressing the Enter key with Shortcut Keys

In Excel, you can also use shortcut keys to solve this task.

After entering the content, please press Ctrl + Enter keys together instead of just Enter key, and you can see the entered cell is still selected.

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• To post as a guest, your comment is unpublished.
  Does not do anything useful - I want return to act as a return and start a new line within the cell - this 'solution' simply removes the pre-existing text if you start to type again

  • To post as a guest, your comment is unpublished.
    Alt+Enter starts a new line in the cell
• To post as a guest, your comment is unpublished.
  Can you use these options specifically just for one particular worksheet or range of cells? i want normally to move down on pressing ENTER but in a range of cells want to move right!

While working with Excel, we sometimes enter long text strings in a cell so that the contents either spill over to the empty adjacent cells, or are visually clipped such that we cannot see the rest of the contents.

We can display all the contents of column C above by doing any of these methods:

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• Adjust the column width to show the contents
• Wrap the text in cells C4:C6
• Insert a line break or a hard return

Figure 1. Final result: Inserting a hard return

This article assists all levels of Excel users on how to add a hard return in a cell.

What is a hard return?

Hard return, also referred to as a paragraph or line break, causes a line to break at a certain point, and begins the next line with the remaining text string.

It can be done through the keyboard shortcut:

Alt + Enter

How to add a hard return?

In order to make a hard return or the equivalent of a carriage return, we simply follow these steps:

• Enter the edit mode by pressing F2 or double-clicking the cell we want to edit
• Suppose we want to insert a hard return before “123” in cell C4. We place the cursor to the left of “123”.

Figure 2. Enter edit mode and place cursor at specific position

• Press Alt + Enter on the keyboard

Only “4th Floor” remains in the first line of text while “123 8th Avenue New York” is now on the second level.

Figure 3. Inserting a hard return through Alt + Enter

We can insert one more hard return within the cell after “Avenue” to enter “New York” on the third line. Below image shows the output after we have inserted hard returns to cell C4. All the contents of the cell are now visible in the window.

Figure 4. Output: Hard return in a cell

We can do the same to the succeeding cells C5 and C6 in order to display all the contents in the cells.

Figure 5. Output: Hard return within cells

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We have successfully added hard returns within the cells and we can now apply this tip when entering data into our worksheet. Hard returns come in handy when we want to force line breaks within cells with long text strings or sentences, and it is super easy to do with just one shortcut: Alt + Enter.

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