How to Enclose a Cell With Quotes in Excel

Enclosing a directly typed cell value with quotations marks in Microsoft Excel is as easy as typing the characters, as Excel automatically recognizes the value as text and properly displays the quotation marks. However, using a formula to enclose a cell with quotes causes problems, because Excel uses double quotation marks to specify text and will discard the quotes. To counter this limitation, use Excel's "Char" function to force the quotes to appear.

Instructions

1. Open Microsoft Excel.

2. Type text values directly into the cell, complete with quotes. As an example, entering "text" with the quotes is recognized as text, so Excel keeps the quotes.

3. Enter "=CHAR(34)&A1&CHAR(34)" without quotes in any other cell to display the contents to cell A1 enclosed with quotes. Change "A1" to any cell reference.

4. Enter "=CONCATENATE(CHAR(34),A1,CHAR(34))" as an alternate way to surround the contents of A1 with quotes. This produces the exact same results as in the previous step.