How to use the Concat (concatenate) function in Excel

Sometimes you just need to join the contents of two columns together, for example if you have imported a list of names where the First Name and Surname columns are separated.  You can easily do this by using the concat function in Excel (this used to be the concatenate function before Excel 2016).  You can use it for more than one column.

Applies to: Excel 2016, Excel 2013, Excel 2010, Excel 2007, Excel 2003

• Place your cursor in the cell where you want the result to appear
• Type =CONCAT(cellref1,” “,cellref2)
  where cellref represents each column you want to combine
• Press Enter
• Copy down the column

Note: the ” ” is to create a space between the two text items and can be omitted if you don’t want a space.

You can use the concat function with more than one column.  For example, you may have a Titles column before the First Name, or a Middle Name column.  Or you may have some address columns that you would like to combine.

Using the concat function will really speed up your work – try it!