TextJoin()
TEXTJOIN is a text function that was introduced in Excel 2016 to join text in cells together.
Initially, you may think that the function is not that worthwhile. After all, we already have the ampersand (& ) as well as the CONCATENATE function to join text together.
However, TEXTJOIN really shines when you want to join multiple cells together as you only have to specify the delimiter once.
The syntax is =TEXTJOIN(delimiter, ignore empty, text…)
Let me give you a simple example using a person’s first, middle and last name and their professional designation.
If we used CONCATENATE, the equation would be : =CONCATENATE(A2,” “,B2,” “,C2,” “,D2).
If we used TEXTJOIN it is, =TEXTJOIN(” “,,A2:D2)
and this result would display:
| Lisa Marie Brown CPA |
Clearly, TEXTJOIN is a bit simpler and a bit more elegant if you have a lot of cells that you want to join together and you want to use the same delimiter throughout.
You can use different delimiters if you wish and it is still simpler than CONCATENATE as well. In this example, I just wanted spaces after each of the names but I wanted a comma before the professional designation so I used =TEXTJOIN(” “,,A2,B2,C2,”,”,D2) and Excel displayed the following result.
| Lisa Marie Brown , CPA |
So, add TEXTJOIN to your arsenal of text functions if you have Excel 2016.