In this Article I will guide you how to concatenate multiple cells quickly using different methods using examples. You will also see that you shouldn't merge cells.
Why concatenation is better than merging?
Are you looking for the information how to merge cells in Excel? You shouldn't merge cells. Instead of merging cells please read and see that it is better to concatenate cells than to merge. Or at least concatenation is the alternative to merge which you should at least consider.
Concatenation of cells means clubbing the data of many cells into one cell. Sometimes we confuse merge cells with concatenate cells.
When you merge cells, you "physically" merge two or more cells into a single cell. As a result, you have one larger cell that is displayed across multiple rows and/or columns in your worksheet.
When you concatenate cells in Excel, you combine only the contents of those cells. In other words, concatenation in Excel is the process of joining two or more values together.
Difference between merging and concatenation:
We have an inbuilt concatenate function in Excel in the following format:
=CONCATENATE(text1, [text2], …)
For example if we want to concatenate data from cell A1, B1
We write
=CONCATENATE(A1,B1)
The results explain this.
We can also use strings in the formula itself as explained in the following example
=CONCATENATE(A1,B1, "I am 40 years old")
We can also use formula calculated values like dates as explained in the following example:
=CONCATENATE(A1,B1, " Today is ",TEXT(TODAY(), "dd-mmm-yy"))
Which gives the following result:
As you can see cells are concatenated now.
Alternatively, you can use the "&" operator to concatenate cells in Excel.
Note that when concatenating cells with the "&" operator, you can also include text strings by enclosing them in quotation marks.
Both the CONCATENATE function and the "&" operator can be used to quickly combine multiple cells into a single value. Choose the method that works best for you and your data.
Further reading: How to calculate ratio using concatenate function? How to count cells with a specific content in a range? How to display a single quote in a cell? How to remove cell border color?