Hi - Dave here.
Happy Friday!
One of the key skills you need to be good with Excel formulas is
concatenation. Put simply, concatenation is just a fancy name for joining text together. In Excel formulas, the operator for concatenation is the ampersand (&) character.
A good example of a simple concatenation task is the creation of an email address using a first and last name. The core problem is to join together parts of a name and a domain, as seen in the worksheet below. The formula in E5, copied down, is:
=LOWER(LEFT(C5)&B5)&"@"&$E$2
[
Download the workbook and read the full explanation]
In a work environment, there are many different schemes for creating an email address. For example, a name like "Tom Brown" may appear as tbrown@abc.com, tom.brown@abc.com, brown_tom@abc.com, tombrown@abc.com, etc. The attached worksheet contains formulas for these alternatives. All of the formulas use concatenation to join text together in different ways. Click the link above to download the worksheet and try it out yourself.
More on concatenation
If you are new to concatenation, this article provides a detailed overview:
How to concatenate in Excel
Excel formulas
We maintain a list of over 500 working formulas
here.
If you need more structure, we also offer
video training.
Have a great weekend!
Dave
