Charles Nichols

Dearest Reader,

In the realm of Microsoft Excel, I have found a marvellous tool for combining and unifying multiple strings of text into a singular form. The TEXTJOIN function is a powerful tool that allows you to concatenate, or join, multiple text strings into one. This function is available in Excel 2019 and later versions, and in Office 365. It is similar to the CONCATENATE function, but offers some additional features and benefits.

To use the TEXTJOIN function, you will need to specify several arguments:

• The delimiter: This is the character or string that separates the text strings you want to join. For example, if you want to join the words “red” “green” and “blue” into one string, with a comma and space between them, you would use a comma and space (, ) as the delimiter.
• Ignore empty: This argument is optional, and allows you to specify whether or not empty cells should be ignored in the joining process. If set to TRUE, empty cells will be ignored, and if set to FALSE, empty cells will be treated as empty strings.
• Text1, Text2, …: These are the text strings that you want to join. You can specify up to 252 text strings in one function.

Here’s an example of how you might use the TEXTJOIN function in a simple case:

=TEXTJOIN(“, “, TRUE, A1, B1, C1)

In this example, the delimiter is a comma and space (, ), and we’ve set the “ignore empty” argument to TRUE, so any empty cells in A1, B1, and C1 will be ignored in the joining process.

You can also use the TEXTJOIN function with a range of cells, instead of individual cell references. For example, to concatenate all the values in the range A1:A5, with a comma and space as the delimiter, and ignoring empty cells, you could use the following formula:

=TEXTJOIN(“, “, TRUE, A1:A5)

The TEXTJOIN function is also very useful when working with data from other sources, such as external databases or web services. For example, you could use the function to join data from multiple columns into a single string, which can then be used in a formula or to create a chart.

In addition to its basic concatenation capabilities, the TEXTJOIN function can also be used in conjunction with other Excel functions to perform more advanced tasks. For example, you could use the IF function to check the value of a cell before concatenating it, or use the COUNTIF function to determine the number of non-empty cells in a range before concatenating them.

The TEXTJOIN function is a versatile and useful tool for working with text in Excel. With its ability to concatenate multiple text strings, ignore empty cells, and work with ranges of cells, it can help you streamline your data analysis and visualization tasks, and make your work more efficient and effective.

Yours,
Charles