Merged cell with no needed spaces

Hi. I am using Excel2003 and when I creat a merged cell, the word inside it gets unneeded space after it.

When I create a merged cell with the word "PEN" and I 'copy and paste' the word "PEN" from Excel to the NotePad, the word "PEN" gets a lot of spaces after it and looks like that: "PEN___________________"
(read _ as a space. so, how you can see, the word gets a lot spaces after the it)

Is there any way to remove these spaces after the words inside the merged cell?

Are they spaces or is it a single tab character? I get a tab character when I paste a merged cell into Notepad. This is because the second cell of the merged cells will be represented by a tab in Notepad. You get the same effect when you copy and paste two cells, where just the first cell has data.

Anyway, the solution lies in avoiding merged cells. Why do you merge them in the first place? Use "Center across selection" in the Horizontal section of the Aligment tab of the formatting dialog to achieve the same effect, but retain the individual cells.

If you don't want to center the text across several cells, then use formatting to make the range appear as one cell.

Merged cells should never have been invented. They lead to all kinds of trouble.

Originally Posted by sussington

How has this not been resolved in over a decade? There has got to be some sort of cell format that takes away that annoying tab spacing from the text in merged cells.

Cell formatting is purely cosmetic and only changes the appearance of a cell, not it's contents.