What does concatenate mean in Excel?

The concatenate function is one of Excel's text functions. It is used to join two or more words or text strings together.

For example, sometimes data distributed over multiple columns in an excel spreadsheet is more efficient to use when combined into one column.

Let us say that you have two columns containing employee names, the first column contains the First Name and the second column contains the Last Name. You can use the concatenate function to join these two names placing the result into into one cell. The formula will look something like this:

=CONCATENATE(A2," ",B2) where A2 is the first name and B2 is the last name. The " " adds a space between the two names. The result showing the full name could be placed in C2 and then copied down to show all the other full names.

The same result can be achieved without actually using the concatenate function. Instead type =A2&" "&B2 into cell C2. The & characters join the cell values together with a space in between.

Another example would be to create company email addresses based on staff names. For example,
=A2&B2&"@companyname.co.uk"

The main benefit for using concatenate is time saving. Rather than typing in 100 full names they can be created simply by copying the formula.

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