Hi UHsoccer,
You can't make Excel display, select or operate on only part of a cell. Once cells are merged they effectively become one cell in this sense. In order to get Excel to select just part of a merged cell that is in column A, you must first unmerge the cell. If you are trying to do this via a macro, I suggest you just add code to unmerge all the merged cells that fall both inside and outside of the column A, perform your desired operation on column A, then re-merge the cells. This can all be done in VBA. Just be aware that any operation you perform on the contents of any part (sub-cell) of a merged cell only "takes" if it is performed on the first (top left) cell in the range.