You might find yourself working with multiple columns of data in a spreadsheet. But it can sometimes be useful to combine these columns into a single cell. Fortunately, that’s easy to do – no retyping required, thanks to Excel’s CONCATENATE function. Let’s learn how to concatenate data in Microsoft Excel.
How to Concatenate Data in Excel
Imagine that someone has sent you a list of names. The first names are in column A; the last names are in column B. But for your purposes, you need each combined name in a single cell. It would be tedious to retype each name into a new cell, and thanks to the CONCATENATE function, there’s no need to do it.
Begin by clicking into an empty cell. For this, let’s use cell C2. Type an = sign. That tells Excel that you’ll be inputting a formula into the cell that you have selected. Then, type CONCATENATE(.
So far, your formula reads:
=CONCATENATE(
Now, it’s time to select the cells containing values that you want to join together. Begin by clicking into the top first-name cell, A2. Then, type a comma. Now, you’ll likely want to add a space between the first and last names. To do that, type ” “, ensuring that you leave a single blank space between the quotations. Your formula is:
=CONCATENATE(A2," "
Complete it by typing another comma, then selecting the top last-name cell. Close the parentheses, and review your formula:
=CONCATENATE(A2," ",B2)
Hit Enter, and you’ll see the combined name appear in cell C2. From here, you can click and drag the lower right corner of the cell to copy your formula down through the rest of the list. Excel will automatically adjust it, thereby combining the other names.
As you can see, CONCATENATE makes it easy to join values together in Excel.
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