Joining texts

[Poogermum]

Hi, 

Hopefully just a quick question. Been looking at the discussions on here to expand my knowledge. I came across the question of joining texts the day and I was just wondering what the advantage of these approaches are in comparison to one another:

=CONCATENATE()

=cell1 & cell2

=jointext()

I can see that jointext allows you to exclude blanks and to put a delimiter between the joined words and you can make sure that there is no delimiter after the last piece of joined text. So I can see a clear advantage of using this formula. You can also use an array rather than having to add individual cell references. So jointext() is great and I will use it in the future.

However, what is the advantage of CONCATENATE() over simply referencing the cells and joining with &???? There might not be one, however, I thought I ask whether i am missing something here...

[#2]

@Poogermum Just for reference, the function in English Excel is called TextJoin(), not jointext.

Concatenate() offers no advantages over using the ampersand symbol "&". It only exists to provide compatibility with other spreadsheet software. I think it goes back to the days of Lotus 1-2-3. In order to open spreadsheets that were created with Lotus 1-2-3 and were using the Concatenate() function, Excel had to have that function too, so the spreadsheet would not break.

Today, there is no reason whatsoever to use Concatenate(). Using the & sign is always shorter.

[#3]

thanks great reply!