The TEXTJOIN Function: A Guide to Merging Text in Excel

The TEXTJOIN Function: A Guide to Merging Text in Excel

While Excel has long had functions like CONCATENATE and the & operator for joining text, the TEXTJOIN function is a modern and more powerful solution. Introduced in Excel 2019 and Microsoft 365, it allows you to combine text from multiple cells or a range of cells into a single cell, with a specified delimiter and the ability to ignore blank cells. This makes it an incredibly efficient tool for creating lists, labels, or formatted text strings from your data.

How the TEXTJOIN Function Works

The syntax for TEXTJOIN is straightforward and efficient:

=TEXTJOIN(delimiter, ignore_empty, text1, [text2], ...)

• delimiter: The character or string you want to place between each text item. This is required and must be enclosed in double quotes (e.g., ", " or " - ").
• ignore_empty: A logical value (TRUE or FALSE) that tells Excel whether to ignore empty cells in the range. Using TRUE is often the most practical choice.
• text1, [text2], ...: The text items you want to join. This can be individual cells, a range of cells (like `A1:A10`), or even other functions.

A Practical Example: Creating a Name List

Imagine you have a list of first and last names in separate cells and you want to combine them into a single cell with a comma and a space as the separator.

First Name	Last Name
John	Doe
Jane	Smith

To join the names in cells `A2:A3` and `B2:B3` into a single, comma-separated list, you would use this formula:

=TEXTJOIN(", ", TRUE, A2, B2)

This formula would return "John Doe, Jane Smith". If you had a larger range, you could use `A2:A10` instead of listing each cell individually. The `TEXTJOIN` function streamlines data preparation and presentation tasks, making it a powerful addition to your Excel toolkit.