Nothing To Do With Fooling Cats
If you have several columns of data that you need put together, there are functions in Excel for that. The one I use most—because of its versatility—is CONCAT. So let’s say you want to put the left three columns in this table into a single output in the Cost Code column.
Start typing out “=CONCAT” and press TAB to autocomplete.
Now, we don’t simply want to mash this data together. We’re going to format it to look like other similar pieces of data because we’re adding them to a set. The Cat and Code columns will go inside parentheses and be joined with a hyphen. Then, we’re going to add a space and place the Description beside that.
Each term (text1,text2,…) in CONCAT is joined by a comma. The quotation marks in the formula tell Excel “This is text.”
- Add an open-parentheses, “(“.
- Type a comma and click the cell in the Cat column.
- Type a comma then add the hyphen, “-“.
- Type a comma then click the cell in the Code column.
- Type a comma then add the close-parentheses and space at the same time, “) “.
- Type a comma then click cell in the Description column.
- Finally, Press Enter.
If you have your data formatted as a table, it will automatically fill down to the bottom of the data set. Otherwise, double click square fill handle on the bottom right corner of the cell containing the formula.
And the results:
