Better CONCATENATE for Combining Strings
Discover a better way to combine strings in Google Sheets using the ampersand method instead of the traditional CONCATENATE function. This video explores the limitations of CONCATENATE and introduces simpler alternatives for effective text manipulation.
When you're trying to combine text in a cell, you are probably going to be told about concatenate . Concatenate function is just this concat ate and we're just gonna put strings together. We can put a first name here, a reference to another cell, a comma, a space, then another comma and their last name, and we can concatenate or, or put together as many strings as we want, essentially, almost. But concatenate has its issues. One it's hard to spell, it's hard to remember. It's a very complicated name for a very simple function, but it works. And I wanna show you something that might be a simpler, or maybe is it better than concatenate? Well, one option is concat. Concat is shorter, but it's only going to combine two.
Value. So if we have first name and last name, it's gonna not allow you to have that space there. So if you need to add extra text, extra items, extra emojis, or anything more than two items, concat is not going to work. Here's another way without a formula . We'll just select this. Reference B two. That's that first name. We're gonna put an ampersand. Then in quotes, put a space as well, another ampersand, and C two. And there we go. That is concatenating. That is bringing all of those strings together without the formula of concatenate . Now, there is one downside, obviously. You're not using a normal function like this equals function name, and then some strings, you're just putting the strings together, but
you still have that equal sign. So is it a formula ? And let's see. We'll say this is a cell. Is it formula ? Yes. So it's still going to act and be a formula , even though it's not using a formula name, it does have that equal sign, and I think this ampersand is really awesome just for very simple concatenation or adding those strings together or adding even a little bit of a string at the end or at the beginning of other kind of formulas. However, one little downside is that it is only one character, an ampersand. So if you have other formulas here, this ampersand might get lost in the fray of all of the formulas if it's a very complicated formula combination. However, I do think the simplicity of ampersand is way better than concatenate .
You are watching better sheets here on YouTube. Make sure you check out this video or this video and subscribe right now to get more tips, tricks, how tos, get more out of your Google sheets than you ever have before. I'm excited to be making a ton more videos here. Ask me questions down in the comments and I will answer them in future videos. But for right now, right here, one of these videos is gonna be your next Google sheet.