How to Add a New Line in a Formula in Google Sheets

In order to use line breaks, new lines or soft returns within a formula you need to enter them in as part of the formula definition. Google Sheets has a CHAR function that returns any Unicode character from its code or number. The decimal Unicode for a new line (line feed) is 10. So using CHAR(10) in a formula will output a newline.

If the text in your cell doesn’t come from a formula, it is possible to simply type newlines into cells to break things up to suit you.

Line feed or new lines using CHAR

CHAR(table_number)

This function converts a number into a character according to the current Unicode table.

Google Sheets CHAR Help

CHAR takes 1 parameter, table_number, the number of the Unicode character to return. You must give this number in DECIMAL format. Many lists of Unicode characters show hexadecimal, so make sure you either first convert to decimal using HEX2DEC or look at a table that shows decimal codes.

If you look at the Unicode character table of control codes on Wikipedia, you can see that the decimal code for line feed is 10. So CHAR(10) will return a line feed (or new line) into our formula.

Here’s an example. We use CHAR to insert line breaks into a formula by concatenating quoted text strings and newlines together using ampersand (&). We could also do this using the CONCATENATE() function, but & is easier to read when you understand its use.

="This line of text breaks here >"&char(10)&"and here >"&char(10)&"It's as easy as that"

You can also use the CHAR function to insert any other characters found in those Unicode tables into a Google Sheet, as below where we use char(937) and char(928) to add the Greek symbols Omega and Sigma into a cell.