Combine 2 Columns into 1: First Names and Last Names Together

Beginner

About this Tutorial

Add together two columns data.

Featured Formulas

ARRAYFORMULA() CONCATENATE()

Video Transcript

<div> Hey, so we're trying to combine first names and last names together, and maybe you have column A, you have first name, column B of last name, and we want to get the full name. There's two ways to do that and they have pros and cons for each one. So the simplest way is to do concatenate . You go equal concatenate . Nate let Google help you out how to spell that. You can do a two. . Then you're gonna want to add a space just quote space quote, b2, and now we have the first name and last name into full name, so we have a full name column.

Now we can, what we can do is we want to do that for the. Column. Right. We have to copy and paste this all the way down. If, if we have a hundred, 205,000 names this is gonna be quite a long time to get this. If we wanna just. Quick and dirty, get this done. Go ahead and use concatenate for a few. But if you have a very long list, say thousands and you know it, you know, okay, I have a thousand names here. How do we do that? Well, sure, we can command C this and then shift command. And hit the down arrow and then pace and great, we have it.

But what's gonna happen if, if we have some. Some error , you know, we'll have some errors or we, we might not even know we want that yet, and we have to come back every time we add more. Maybe we only have this many and every time we add more, we have to remember to use this concatenate . Function down. So an interesting way to do it is using array formula and it just gets a tiny bit complicated because we're gonna use these curly brackets. So what we're gonna do, let me do a quick one here for you. So we do array formula .

And array formula is just saying we're gonna get an array, which is a, a, either a column or a row. And we want the entire thing. Well, we have to put it in curly brackets and we say A to. And also we want to make sure we don't, don't do A to a or there's gonna, it's gonna like keep growing. I, I had a long problem with that, but let's say we want.  one, two, oh, sorry, A two. We only want a two to a 100. We wanna take that array and we'll use the and amper sand.

We'll put the space in between and we'll use another amper sander and, and then we'll use the other, the next curly bracket will be B2 to B 100. Now what that does is it combines exactly the same way as concatenate , but it doesn't use every. It doesn't use a formula in every single one. So we actually only have the formula up here in this road, D two, and we can fix, say we realize, oh, we actually have 500 names. You can go up here and fix that here once, you don't have to copy and paste anything. You just do that. And we have all of this and.

What's good, this too is it prevents people, so if you have some other people working on this sheet and they come in here and they somehow delete this or cut it, if they command X and paste it and they're like, oh, I don't have anything here. You have to come in and clean this up. Right? Well, with, with a, there's array Formula One. You only have to remember that this cell has.  the array formula in it. And you only have to remember that because you cannot delete anything else. You cannot delete these.

You only can delete that one and then you can command Z Or you just remember this array formula , curly brackets around the arrays you wanna combine . And that is it. That's a, a unique way to put the first names and last names together.</div>