SOLVED

Excel formula

Copper Contributor

This is embarrassing to ask but I simply can't remember how to do something that I used to do quite frequently with Excel several years ago. I want to enter a person's surname in column A, their First name in column B and their middle name in column C. 

I used to create a formula in column D to take the contents of column B, column C and column A to assemble the entire names into a readable format. An example would be Jones, Robert, James and, when combined would read Robert Jame Jones in column D.

I'm currently using Excel Office 365 whereas before I was using an older version of Excel, possibly before xls switched to xlsx.

Can anyone help me with this; it certainly isn't coming back to my now much older brain?

Thank you,

Dennis

2 Replies
best response confirmed by Dennis2321 (Copper Contributor)
Solution

@Dennis2321 

 

You don't have to use any of the new features of Office 365 Excel.  Old functions work just fine.  And for this, you do not even need to use an old function (CONCAT).  Simply enter the following into D2:

 

=B2 & " " & C2 & " " & A2

 

Of course, things get interesting if you want to handle the case where there is no middle name.  At a minimum:

 

=B2 & " " & IF(C2="", "", C2 & " " ) & A2

 

And then there are all sorts of other special cases to handle.

Thank you. I had forgotten about the use of the & sign. I tried looking up files from 10 years ago but couldn't find any where I had previously merged names together. It's amazing what you forget when you don't do something for a long time.
Dennis
1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by Dennis2321 (Copper Contributor)
Solution

@Dennis2321 

 

You don't have to use any of the new features of Office 365 Excel.  Old functions work just fine.  And for this, you do not even need to use an old function (CONCAT).  Simply enter the following into D2:

 

=B2 & " " & C2 & " " & A2

 

Of course, things get interesting if you want to handle the case where there is no middle name.  At a minimum:

 

=B2 & " " & IF(C2="", "", C2 & " " ) & A2

 

And then there are all sorts of other special cases to handle.

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