How to use Excel's concatenate feature

Excel's concatenate feature allows you to put the contents of two (or more) cells together and insert text strings in between them.

In excel, use the & sign in formulas to concatenate (join) the contents of two or more cells, e.g.

=A1&B1&C1

Would put the contents of cells A1, B1 and C1 into one single cell.

You insert text strings by including the text within quotation marks, e.g.

=A1&" this is some text"&B1&"this is some more text"&C1&" final bit of text here."

For example, let's say you take a product export containing all of your products and the URLs for each. Our export system will only output the last part of the URL for the product (excluding your domain name), e.g. 'pair-of-blue-nike-trainers' (instead of http://www.micksshoeshop.com/pair-of-blue-nike-trainers). If you need the full URL in the spreadsheet then you can add this in using excels concatenate feature.

The formula would be

="http://www.micksshoeshop.com/"&A1

You can then use Excel's 'fill down' feature to copy and paste this formula to all of the rows in the spreadsheet.

Special paste

Once you've created a formula like the above to output what you want, you may then want to paste this output into another column in the spreadsheet. When doing this, it's important that you don't copy + paste the formula but the actual outputted values.

You can use the 'special paste' function in Excel to choose to paste the values (rather than the formula).

If you have a Windows Computer once you've copied the data right click into the target cell/rows/columns and then select 'paste special' as shown on the screenshot below.

Then select 'values'.

If you have an Apple Computer you can press ctrl+cmd+v on the keyboard

Then select 'values'.