And we’re back…
We took a brief hiatus for the holiday season here in the United States (Passover, Easter, and 4/20) but we’re back and better than ever.
Say “Hello,” TEXTJOIN
This week, I wanted to introduce you to my next best friend, TEXTJOIN. TEXTJOIN was added to Excel a few years back, and came about – I kid you not – as a result of years of everyone complaining. Well, that’s the way I think it happened.
What can I do with TEXTJOIN?
TEXTJOIN allows you to combine data from different cells into one. That might not seem so novel, but remember the old way of doing things: you would use the CONCATENATE function (or CONCAT for short) or ampersand (‘&’) to connect different cells into on cell in Excel. If you had 100 cells, you would have to click each cell 100 times (Chandoo had a trick to avoid this but it’s no longer necessary under the TEXTJOIN regime). Hence, like I said, TEXTJOIN came as a result of our aggravation at the current way of doing things.
In the video…
In this video, I quickly show you the old way to bring multiple cells together into one cell and then show you how TEXTJOIN awesome improves upon it. So make sure you watch the video at the top of this blog post to get everything.
In the meantime, here’s a quick break down of it how it works:
TEXTJOIN( delimiter, ignore_empty, text1, [ text2, … text_n ] )
delimiter – Here you can specify if you want a delimiter to separate each text item when you combine them. In the example, I start with a space “” (literally, two quotation marks with nothing in them), but you can also do comma (“,”) or multiple spaces (” “). It’s really up to you.
ignore_empty – This is a TRUE/FALSE option that lets you tell Excel if you’re interested in ignoring empty cells.
[text …] – Place all the cells you want to combine into this argument.
Hit ENTER and watch the magic happen!
Get the download files
Click on the button below to get the download files used in this video.
Let us know what you think in the comments!
Did you like this video? What type of data are you joining? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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