Combining two or more strings and values into one cell by gluing them together is know as concatenation. In Excel concatenation can be express in two ways:
=CONCATENATE(A1,A2)
OR
=A1&A2
Where the arguments can be upto 30 cells and / or custom strings enclosed by quotes.
Here are some examples of how it can be used:
| A | B | C | D | |
| 1 | formula: | result: | ||
| 2 | blue | car | =CONCATENATE(A2,B2) | bluecar |
| 3 | green | boat | =A3 & B3 | greanboat |
| 4 | yellow | house | =CONCATENATE(A4 & ” ” & B4) | yellow house |
| 5 | red | tie | =”Today I’ll wear the ” & A5 & ” colored ” & B5 & “.” | Today I’ll wear the red colored tie. |
Joining Two or More String – Concatenation
Concatenation is the process of joining together multiple text strings and values into one cell. Because using the full formula name can result in a lot of typing ampersand can be used in its place. Like in the examples above in C4 and C5 joining additional strings can be done directly in the formula. The addition of extra strings within formulas C4 and C5 help to make them more readable and informative.
Concatenation Works on Numbers Too
If you need to join two numbers together without adding them together or performing some type of arithmetic operation CONCATENATE() or & will work here too. For example: If cell A1=1 and cell A2=2 the formula =A1&A2 would give the result “12” but =A1+A2 would give the result “3”. Instead of adding the values together concatenations allows number values to be glued together, or glued to other pieces of text.
Tags: concatenate, excel, function, microsoft office, Reference