Text Power-Up: A Guide to Excel's CONCATENATE and TEXTJOIN Functions

Combining text in Excel is a common task, and these two functions are your best friends for the job.

Welcome! A fundamental data manipulation task is joining text from multiple cells into one. While the ampersand (`&`) operator is a popular and quick solution, Excel also offers two powerful functions for the job: **CONCATENATE** and **TEXTJOIN**. Understanding the difference between them will make your work with text data much more efficient.

1. The CONCATENATE Function

The `CONCATENATE` function is Excel's classic way to join text. It takes a list of cell references or text strings as arguments and joins them together in the order you provide.

Syntax:

=CONCATENATE(text1, [text2], ...)
            

Practical Example:

Imagine you have a first name in cell A2 ("John") and a last name in B2 ("Doe"). To combine them with a space in between, you would write:

=CONCATENATE(A2, " ", B2)
            

This formula would produce the result `"John Doe"`. The drawback of `CONCATENATE` is that it requires you to list each cell and any delimiters (like a space or a comma) individually, which can be tedious for a long list of cells.

2. The TEXTJOIN Function

For more complex tasks, the `TEXTJOIN` function is a modern and more flexible alternative (available in Excel 2016 and later). It's designed to solve the problem of joining a **range** of cells with a single delimiter and even lets you ignore empty cells.

Syntax:

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

• delimiter: The character(s) you want to place between each piece of text (e.g., `" "` for a space, `", "` for a comma and space).
• ignore_empty: A logical value (`TRUE` or `FALSE`). If you set it to `TRUE`, the function will ignore any blank cells in the range.
• text1, [text2], ...: The cells or ranges you want to join.

Practical Example:

Imagine you have a list of ingredients in cells A2 to A5, but some cells are blank. To join them with a comma and space, you would use this elegant formula:

=TEXTJOIN(", ", TRUE, A2:A5)
            

This single formula will join all the text in the range and, because `ignore_empty` is set to `TRUE`, it will automatically skip any blank cells, giving you a perfectly formatted list.

In short, use `CONCATENATE` for simple, one-off joins, and rely on the superior `TEXTJOIN` for when you need to combine text from a range of cells with a consistent delimiter. Mastering both will give you complete control over your text data.

Continue your Excel journey with more powerful formula tips!