How to Concatenate in Excel (Join Text from Multiple Cells)

Concatenation means joining text from multiple cells into one. You need it constantly — combining first and last names, building full addresses, creating unique IDs from multiple columns, or assembling strings for reports. Excel gives you three ways to do it.

Method 1: The & operator

The simplest approach. Join any cells or text with &:

This joins A2 (first name), a space, and B2 (last name). Result: "John Smith".

Chain as many pieces as needed:

Result: "Chicago, IL, 60601"

Method 2: CONCAT

CONCAT replaces the old CONCATENATE function (still works, just more verbose). It's cleaner for ranges:

Method 3: TEXTJOIN (best for lists)

TEXTJOIN is the modern winner for joining multiple cells with a consistent separator:

• First argument: the delimiter (", ")
• Second argument: TRUE = skip empty cells, FALSE = include them
• Third argument: the range or list of values

This is perfect for building comma-separated lists from a column of values, or joining a variable number of cells without manually counting them.

Practical examples

Full name from separate columns:

Result: "John Smith" (last name first would be =A2&", "&B2)

Full address on one line:

Result: "123 Main St, Chicago, IL, 60601"

Unique ID from department code + employee number:

Result: "FIN-0042" — the TEXT function zero-pads the number to 4 digits.

The Griddy way

Building formatted strings — especially with conditional logic like "include the middle name only if it exists" or "format the date as Month Year" — gets complicated quickly. Just describe what you need:

"Combine the first name, last name, and job title columns into one column formatted as 'First Last — Title', skipping any rows where the title is blank"

Griddy writes and applies the formula across the whole column.