# Flatten Cells

The "flatten cell" operation flattens a cell into all of it's parents. This basically removes a cell by promoting her shapes and instances up in the hierarchy.

Cell flattening can be applied to single instances or cells as a whole. When applied to an instance, the individual instance is resolved into shapes. The instantiated cell will still exist afterwards. When applied to a cell, the cell will disappear and replaced by it's contents in all places it is used.

Instance-wise flattening is available by choosing "Edit/Selection/Flatten Instances". Cell-wise flattening is available by choosing "Edit/Cell/Flatten Cell" or "Flatten Cell" from the cell list's context menu.

The flatten operation offers some options, i.e. the number of hierarchy levels to flatten and how to deal with child cells which become obsolete through this operation. By enabling this "prune" option, all child cells are removed when they are no longer needed. Otherwise, new top level cells will appear - these are the cells which are not longer instantiated.