In this article, we’ll learn how to concatenate in Excel. Concatenation means joining two or more text strings together.
There are four ways to concatenate strings in Excel.
Concatenate in Excel – 4 Different Ways
Let us consider a dataset of people’s first and last names. We are interested in getting their full names by joining their first and last names:
1. Using the & operator
- Go to the cell where you want to display the full name.
- Type =A2&” “&B2.
- Press Enter to display the result.
- Copy the formula for the entire range by dragging down the fill handle.
2. Using CONCATENATE in Excel
The CONCATENATE() function can help us concatenate multiple cells in a more elegant manner.
Syntax: CONCATENATE(text1,[text2],…),
where text1, text2,… are the string values or cell references of the string values to be joined.
- Go to the cell where you want to display the full name.
- Type =CONCATENATE(A2,” “,B2).
- Press Enter to display the result.
- Copy the formula for the entire range by dragging down the fill handle.
3. Using the CONCAT() function
CONCAT replaces the CONCATENATE function in Excel 2019 and the latest version of Office 365. However, the CONCATENATE function will continue to be accessible for compatibility with earlier versions of Excel.
Syntax: CONCAT(text1,[text2],…),
where text1, text2,… are the string values or cell references of the string values to be joined.
Follow these steps to join two text values in Excel:
- Go to the cell where you want to display the full name.
- Type =CONCAT(A2,” “,B2).
- Press Enter to display the result.
- Copy the formula for the entire range by dragging down the fill handle.
4. Using the TEXTJOIN function
The textjoin() function allows for further customizability in terms of adding delimiters while concatenating multiple strings.
Syntax: TEXTJOIN(delimiter,ignore_empty, text1, [text2], …).
It has the following parameters:
- delimiter: Required. A text, space, or characters enclosed by double quotes must appear between each text value that will be joined.
- ignore_empty: Required. If this value is set to TRUE, empty cells ars ignored while joining strings.
- text1, text2,… are the string values or cell references of the string values to be joined.
Let’s learn to use this function to concatenate in Excel
- Go to the cell where you want to display the full name.
- Type =TEXTJOIN(” “,TRUE,A2,B2).
- Press Enter to display the result.
- Copy the formula for the entire range by dragging down the fill handle.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we learned how to concatenate two text strings in Excel using four easy-to-use methods.