Combining two text cells into one

  • Thread starter Thread starter George K
  • Start date Start date
G

George K

How do you copy two text cells into one? ie. If you have two columns such as
First name and Surename, with John and Smith respectively, how do you
combine them into John Smith in one single cell?

Thank you,
George
 
Hi George,

=A1 & " " & B1 Then copy and Edit > Paste Special > Values to get rid of
the formulas.

HTH
Regards,
Howard
 
George

=A1 & " " & B1 will return John Smith when entered in C1

Drag/copy down column C as far as you have names in A and B.

When happy with results, copy column C and Paste Special(in place)>Values.

Now delete A and B if desired.

Gord Dibben Excel MVP
 
Great!! Thanks everyone.

Does anyone know how to do the opposite though? i.e. convert the cell "John
Smith" to two cells (two column): "John" and "Smith"? There are times,
especially in mail merging when we want to say "Dear John" and we have to
have them separately.


Thanks,
George
 
I like to keep my fields in separate columns. It's a heck of a lot easier to
combine them than to separate them.

But you could insert a few columns to the right of your data column and
select your range (single column)
data|text to columns
use delimited by space.

Chip Pearson has some techniques (both worksheet functions and VBA code) at:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/FirstLast.htm

I've found that it's a real pain to separate this kind of thing because of all
the variations of names/titles.

If you can get them in separate fields, save your data that way.
 
Back
Top