Trouble moving text from many cells to one cell

Copper Contributor

Hi Folks. First time user here.  I have a column of 109 names that I want to move to a single cell with a comma as a delimiter.  I have read the help articles and tried TEXTJOIN and COMCAT but I must be missing something.  I even tried cutting and pasting each one into the new cell individually but with the number of projects where I have to do this same thing there has got to be a way I can make this easier for myself.

 

Can someone please tell me what I am missing when I just follow the instructions for TEXTJOIN and COMCAT? Is there something that is not being said that is assumed that everyone should just "known"?  

 

I am looking for a very specific step-by-step procedure.  PLEASE help.

2 Replies

@FHanson3070 

TEXTJOIN and CONCAT are available in Excel in Office 2019, Office 2021 and Microsoft 365, and in the browser version Excel Online too.

If you have Office 2016 or earlier, those functions won't be recognized.

Let's say your names are in D2:D110.

Select the cell where you want the result.

Make sure that this cell is formatted as General, not as Text.

Enter the formula

 

=TEXTJOIN(", ", TRUE, D2:D110)

 

  • ", " specifies that the delimiter will be a comma followed by a space: John, Paul, George, Ringo. If you don't want the space, use "," - this will result in John,Paul,George,Ringo.
  • TRUE tells Excel to skip empty cells, to avoid having multiple delimiters between names.
  • D2:D110 is the range with names.

If you have an older version, there is no straightforward way to do this, but there are solutions. Let me know.

@Hans Vogelaar Thank you so very much, Hans.   I still don't know what I was doing wrong, but this worked perfectly.