Adjacent cells in a worksheet can be merged using two different methods in Origin 8. Cells can be merged manually or they can be set to merge dynamically. Manual merging displays the upper-left cell's content in the area covered by the merged cells. Dynamic merging requires that the selected cells all have the same content.
To merge the cells manually, highlight adjacent cell range you want to merge, and then click the Merge Cells button 
on the Style toolbar. If you merge cells in this way, Origin will show the contents of the upper-left cell, and display it on the top-center of the merged cell. After merging the cells, you can also use the alignment buttons 
to change the alignment of the content in the merged cell area. This ability is not limited to text. You can right click in a cell and insert other objects such as a graph, script variable, or an external image, and then merge multiple adjacent cells to display the inserted object over a larger area.
Note that what is displayed is the content of the upper-left cell in the selected range. Any edits made to the display replaces the content of the upper-left cell. The other cells in the range can have different content and their contents are not cleared by the merge operation. To split the merged cells, select the merged cells, and the Merge Cells button will appear selected on the Style toolbar. Click this button to split the merged cells.
If the contents of adjacent cells are indentical, they can be set to be merged automatically. This automatic cell merging mechanism, or Dynamic Merge, is a cell property which can be set on the Format Cells dialog.
If the cells have the same content and format, they will appear as a merged cell which using the some content and format, while if the cells have the same content only, Origin will display the cells as merged and use the format of the upper-left cell. Unlike manually merging, the cells only appear merged while remaining independent. If you edit and change the content of any of the individual cells in the group, this will automatically break the merge.
The ability to place various objects such as images, graphs and links to other numerical cell content, combined with the ability to flexibly format the worksheet, provides the means for the user to create custom reports. User can, for example, add a blank sheet to an existing book containing analysis results, and then place various objects in this new sheet, such as links to cells in the analysis report sheet tables, links to embedded graphs in the report sheet, links to script variables, and external images. These objects could then be displayed over groups of merged cells in the sheet thus creating a custom, professional report for publishing.
The book, along with such a custom report sheet, could be then saved as an Analysis Template for future use. When new data is placed into the analysis template and the analysis results are updated, linked objects in the custom report sheet will also update.