Join Text Together with Concatenate, Concat and Ampersand!

0:00 Let me share with you the CONCATENATE function, its brother or little sister called CONCAT , and also a secret formula that I think is way better. So concatenate is essentially just squishing two texts or more, two or more texts together. We have strings of characters, little texts, and we're gonna put them together. So with a full name, we wanna combine a first name and a last name, we use CONCATENATE . It's really hard to spell, C-O-N-C-A-T-E-N-A-T-E, but when we start typing concat after our equal sign we can see that we can just select it with our cursor or our mouse. And we're going to select A2 as a reference, a comma, and then our last name.

0:45 But this is not all, because as you can see, we're not getting an actual full name. We're, we're getting the two sides, the first name and the last name literally stuck together. For a full name, we actually need a space, so we add a comma and add a, a space in quotes here. Now, we can do this in a lot of different ways, or we can use a lot of different text. We can do two or more pieces of text and add them together, or we can use CONCAT to do just two. For example, if we wanna create an email, we're gonna use an ID and then add a company name. But let's create an ID. So this is equal to CONCATenate . We're going to pick the first name, comma, and then we're gonna put an underscore, and then a c- uh, quote, comma, and a last name. So we're concatenating together three things, first name, an underscore, and a last name. And now to get email, we might only need CONCAT . They're sort of interchangeable, CONCAT and CONCATENATE , but CONCAT can only use two values. Let's use the ID, comma, and then some text, @ gmail.com or company.org in quotes, and now we have email.

1:31 But I'm gonna show you one special thing, which is we don't even need to use CONCAT or CONCATENATE . In fact, let's go back to our full name, and what are we trying to combine? We're trying to combine this A and… use ampersand, a space, and using an ampersand- B2. So just the ampersand will squish or combine those texts together as well. And we can use this with other formulas to make our formula read fairly easily without having to use concatenate or concat . So, like, if we have this number and we wanna add or say and space the word dollars, we're going to get a number . When we put numbers into concatenate , when we put numbers with the ampersand, sometimes they get rid of all of their f- their format. So here we have a thousand, but we don't have the n- am- um, dollar sign.

2:19 So what we could do is wrap our F2 text here with the formula text, and then we can add a format in quotes. We can say hashtag, comma, hashtags in quotes. And now, magically, we have the dollar sign in front and some text in the back with the ampersand. Again, this could be interchangeable with concat or concatenate , but I really like this ampersand myself. I like to use this a lot in Google Sheet formulas, and I hope you do too now that you know how it works.

3:56 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.