Forum Discussion
New Spill function making concatenate output difficult?
Never mind - I have realised that CONCAT appears to have superseded CONCATENATE, and using CONCAT is giving me the output I need.
Never mind - I have realised that CONCAT appears to have superseded CONCATENATE, and using CONCAT is giving me the output I need.
CONCATENATE was well-known as a piece of garbage that has little to offer over the "&" operator.
TEXTJOIN and CONCAT are the perfect partners for dynamic arrays.
Even less. I didn't google right now, from my memory CONCATENATE() as a function has some limit on number of parameters (you may use as many & as you wish) plus some limits on text length. On practice there is no difference but usability. Some prefer CONCATENATE as more understandable, not necessary to recognize every time what the hell & is. Other prefer & as the fastest way to write formula.
Not the same, but similar story with AND(a,b,c) and a*b*c.
I agree, for three distinct text strings, it is largely a matter of taste. It is the handling of arrays that led me to despise CONCATENATE so much. One example was turning numbers into natural language. I had strings representing units, thousands, millions and billions of dollars as elements of an array. Combining the sub-strings with
= CONCATENATE(INDEX(results,1), INDEX(results,2), INDEX(results,3), INDEX(results,4))
is rubbish; no better than
= INDEX(results,1) & INDEX(results,2) & INDEX(results,3) & INDEX(results,4)
I would go for
= CONCAT(results)
any day. As you say, TEXTJOIN is often better still.
Better to use TEXTJOIN of you'd like to add delimiter
