Excel will give you a warning message telling that you will lose the data, when you try to merge cells using the Merge & Center feature. In this article, we're going to show you how to merge cells in Excel without losing your data.

Steps

1. Begin by adding a new column where you want the merged column to be placed.
   
2. Select the first cell and create a formula CONCATENATE formula, adding a separator if necessary. In this example, we used a space (" ").
   =CONCATENATE(C2," ",D2)
   

3. Copy down the cell to apply to all cells in the column.
4. When all cells in the new column are selected, copy the cells by pressing Ctrl + C. Alternatively, you can click the Copy item from the right-click menu.
5. After copying, open the right-click menu again. This time click the Paste as Values button to replace formulas with static values.
6. Since we got rid of the formulas, we do not need the old columns., and they can be safely removed. You can delete them by selecting the columns and clicking the Delete button from the right-click menu.
7. You will end up with the merged column.