Question

I was reading the documentation for the “range” object on developers.google.com.
For the function “breakApart” it says:

“Break any multi-column cells in the range into individual cells again.”

It says that it returns a “range” object.

I am confused about what it does. I cannot find a “cell” object definition
within the documentation. So I am confused about what it does.

I says to “see also mergeAcross”. This too is unclear. It points back to
“breakApart”.

Has anyone used these two functions? What changes do they make? How do they
affect the “range” that is returned? I can see if they took an “array” of
ranges and combined them into one range or took one range and returned an
array of ranges. But it gives not hint at this, because it says that it
takes one range in and returns one range.

any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

In the example below cells B3 C3 B4 and C4 are merged across, meaning they show as a block in the spreadsheet C6 D6 are also merged. In a script you could define a range of cells, let’s say C6:D6 and merge it like this :

function myFunction() {
   var sh = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
   sh.getRange('C6:D6').mergeAcross();
}

the result would be what you see on C6:D6.
breakApart is the exact symetrical action, just try it in this example function, you’ll get 2 cells again…

If any value was present in one of the cell, the value shown in the merged block will be the top left cell’s value.