The Concatenate function is still available in these newer Excel versions for backwards compatibility, but it’s recommended to switch to Concat so your spreadsheets will keep working in future versions of Excel. And except for the name, they both function exactly the same. In Excel 2016 and later versions, the CONCATENATE function has been replaced with the CONCAT function. Our spreadsheet editor does not currently support the & operator, so we cannot show an example here, but you can try it for yourself in Excel. For example, you can substitute =CONCATENATE(A1, A2) by =A1&A2. You can use it by adding the & symbol between the two values that you want to combine. There is an alternative to the concatenate function that is very convenient because of its shorter notation. This function is mostly used where data is not structured in excel and where we want to combine the data of two or more columns in one column or a row. Concatenate alternative: the Ampersand & operator Concatenate in Excel is used to combine values from several cells in one cell or join different pieces of text in one cell. If they wouldn’t have, the result would for example be Hi there,Mr.Charly (Note the lack of spaces).Īnother way to add spaces in between words is by adding the space in the concatenate function itself, like so: =CONCATENATE(C2, " ", B2, " ", A2). We do need to mention that the Title and Greeting column have an extra space after the values. The ampersand symbol & is an alternate way to concatenate two or more texts in Excel. ) and A2 ( Charly) we end up with the text Hi there, Mr. CONCATENATE( textstring, cellnumber(s) ) Example 3: We can include any symbol, space, no space between two cell values as per requirements while concatenating. So by combining C2 ( Hi there, ), B2 ( Mr. The Concatenate function in the Complete message column combines the values in the columns to its left.