How to Use Excel's Concatenate Function

Excel's Concatenate function joins text strings into a single text string. You may select a range of cells to create multiple strings if the cell that will hold the results is a row that includes the selected cells. The following steps will show how to use Excel's Concatenate function.

Instructions

1. Learn the syntax for Concatenate. It is Concatenate (text_1,text_2,...text_n) where text_1,text_2,...text_n are 1 to 30 text items that will be joined together. These values may be numbers, text strings or references to single cells.

2. Use the ampersand (&) as the calculation operator. This method also may be used to join text items instead of the Concatenate function. For example, =A1&A2 will return the same result as =Concatenate (A1,A2).

3. Look at an example for Concatenate. Set A2=salmon, A3=species, A4=25 and enter =Concatenate("Stream population for ",A2," ",A3," is ",A4,"/mile") in a cell. This formula will return a result of "Stream population for salmon species is 25/mile".

4. Study the use of cell ranges for Concatenate. Enter =Concatenate(A2:A3) in cell B2. Notice that Concatenate only displays salmon in cell B2 because it only uses text strings that are in the results row. You would need to use an appropriate Concatenate formula on each row in order to use fields on those rows.

5. Enter a Concatenate formula automatically. Position the cursor in the cell you wish to use, select the Insert menu on the menu bar and select "Function" from the "Insert Sub-menu." Select the "Text" category and then the "Concatenate" function. Supply the arguments as prompted and click the "OK" button to display the results

Resources

• More About Excel on the Microsoft Website