One of the most useful formulas in Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel is the CONCATENATE function. Giving the function a pretty vague name like "concatenate", Google Sheets doesn't make it clear exactly what it does, so let me explain what Concatenate does.
Note: This is not the same thing as merging cells. Merging mostly involves consolidating space.
I will show you how to combine cells in just a couple easy steps. It is a great technique for consolidating entire rows of data into just one cell.
What Does the Concatenate Function Do?
The Excel CONCATENATE function concatenates "joins" up to 30 values together and returns the result as a single cell of text. Also, it is important to note that it doesn't merge cells, but rather it combines them all into the designated cell. while it does combine columns like CONCATENATE, merging cells is an entirely different process.
In short, you can use it to quickly combine different cells from entire columns with other, separate columns.
The Google Sheets, "Concatenate" Function behaves much the same as Excel.
Note: In Excel 2019 and later, operations like the TEXTJOIN or CONCAT functions are typically viewed as better solutions to combining cells.
The concatenate formula allows us to combine the text of multiple cells into a single cell. Also, keep in mind that when it comes to data, cells can be any sort of number, symbol, or text.
This is not the same as merging rows or merging columns since we are combining the cell contents and when we merge rows or merge columns we can only keep the cell contents of one set of the cell references.
Examples
Here are a few examples that can give you a better picture about what the concatenate function can do.
Example 1: Text Data
You have a spreadsheet in google sheets with a First Name column and Last Name column but want to create a 3rd column that is the full name (First Name + Last Name).
Here, you can see that we used the Concatenate function to combine two cells into one third cell, even though they are text cells. also, if you want to add space between the cells, you will want to put the space notation, " ".
Example 2: Numerical Data
You have a list of phone numbers and you would like to combine the code and the area code. So, you would add the two new columns and combine the one cell column with the two new cells. in Google Sheets. So instead of it just being the phone number it would look more like (Code+Area Code+Phone Number).
As you can see from this example, CONCATENATE is friendly with numeric data just as much as it is with Text data. It is also important to reiterate that you can add any text, space, or symbol as long as you keep it in quotations.
(B4," ",C4) adds a space between the two cells: +1 (202)
(B4,"&",C4) adds an & symbol but no space: +1&(202)
Step #1: "=CONCATENATE()"
As you can See, the data table is full of single numbers, letters and words. To combine the cells, simply use the function "=CONCATENATE()". When writing this function, fill in the range of the cells within the parentheses of the function. For this instance, the function would read as:
"=CONCATENATE(B3:E3)"
As you can also see, when you fill in the formula, an end result of the equation is displayed above as a sort of preview. This is a good way to make sure that you filled in the equation correctly.
Step #2: Click and Drag
The second and last step will be to click and drag through the column to fill out the rest of the data. The equation will change variables as you drag down the column.
And that is how you combine cells in Google Sheets, as opposed to splitting the cells..