How To Join Multiple Cells In A Spreadsheet.

In my last post, I showed you how to take information from one cell and split it into two different cells. In this post, I'm going to show you how to take multiple cells and combine their data into one cell.

There are a couple of ways to merge the cells, but they are both based on the concatenate feature. When you concatenating things, you are linking, or joining them together. In the example that we'll be looking at today, we're going to be taking lists of student first and last names that we have in different cells and putting them together in a different cell.

Linking Cells Together

Step #1

The first thing that we'll need to do is insert a blank cell to the right of the cells that you want to merge. In this example we would need to insert a column in between B and C. To do this, simply right click on one of the cell headers (either B or C) and choose to insert to the left or right depending on which column you clicked on. In this example, I clicked on column B so I would choose to insert 1 column to the right.

Step #2

Now we need to enter the formula to combine the cells containing the information that we are interested in merging. In order to put the two cells containing Keith and Perez together, we would use the following formula:

What this formula is telling the spreadsheet program to do is take the data in cell A2 (Keith) AND put whatever is in between the two quotations marks (a blank space) AND the data in cell B2 (Perez) and merge them together. As you can see, once I've completed telling the program bar what data I want, it gives me a preview of what will appear in cell C2 - Keith Perez. 

It is important that you remember to put the ampersand (& sign) between each cell that you want to merge. In this case, I wanted to enter a space between the first and last name. If I didn't want the space, I could have left out the " " and just typed =(a2&b2) which would have given me KeithPerez.

Once I've entered the formula into the top cell, I can simply copy the equation into the cells beneath.