Add Dash in Excel

For some things in Excel, there are several ways in which they can be done. Such is the case with formatting, usually. One such thing is also adding a symbol.

We will show this in the example of adding a dash in Excel.

Add Dash in Excel

There are two types of the dash in Excel: en-dash (“– “) and em-dash (“—“). The first way to create any of these two is to Insert tab >> Symbols >> Symbol:

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On the pop-up window that appears, we have two tabs: Symbols and Special Characters. We will go to the second tab (Special Characters):

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When you open this window, the first things that can be seen are Em and En dash. To insert them, we need to choose and click Insert. That simple. We will do just that in cells A1 and A2, and this is the result we will end up with:

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There are also two more ways to insert dashes in Excel: 1) Using a numeric keypad; 2) Using a formula.

  1. Some laptops don’t have a numeric keypad. On the ones that do have this option, you can create dashes using the following combination:
  1. Using formulas is maybe the easiest and most convenient option for inserting dashes. The formulas are as follows:

As can be seen in the picture below:

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Formulas are also the best way to combine dashes with some text. For example, if we insert this text in cell A6:

This is our end product:

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Tomasz Decker is an Excel specialist, skilled in data analysis and financial modeling.