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hi everyone my name is kevin today i want to show you how you can concatenate text in microsoft excel and as full disclosure before we jump into this i work at microsoft it's something i got to say for hr purposes especially when i talk about microsoft stuff so concatenate what does that even mean well imagine that you have two columns of data and you want to bring them together that's what concatenate means you want to connect those two pieces of data together or you basically join data together it's actually a lot easier than you think and the really sad thing is i've i've had people reach out to me asking me this like oh you know i spent maybe the last hour hour and a half going through these two columns in excel and then taking the first column and pasting it in with the second column and then it's just like oh my gosh that is a waste of time you don't have to do it manually the whole reason you use the spreadsheet program is because it automates it for you all right well enough wasting time why don't we jump in and i'll show you how to do it here i am on my pc i'm using the latest version of microsoft excel and you'll notice that the sheet is conveniently set up where i need to using concatenation what you'll see is i have this first name column this person in the second row is really awesome that's my name and it goes down all the way through rows nine now this is a short enough list where i could go through and say okay i gotta type in the full name and i could just type it in but let's say you're working with thousands and thousands of rows of data or even just 50 rows of data it takes a lot of time to do that by hand so let's figure out how we could have excel do this for us now what you can do is click on the function option right up here and what we're going to do is we're going to type in concatenate usually what i like to do is i like typing in the first little bit of it and i click on go so that way i don't have to spell the whole thing but what you'll see is it pops up these two different functions which is concat and concatenate and they do exactly the same thing but what you see is it says concatenates a list or range of text strings the second one joins several text strings into one text string so it does the same thing so let's go ahead and click ok and what it's asking me to do now is it says well what's the first text that you want to concatenate with the second text so why don't i go through and i'm going to click on cell a2 we'll select that and now i'm going to go into the second one now what i could do is if i just clicked on my last name you'll notice that it just combines them kevin with no space stratford but i want this to be the full name so i want a space in between these so what i could do is i'm actually going to go ahead and i'm going to insert a space here and then i'm going to paste stratfor into text 3. what you'll see happens now now you can see the result where it has my first name space last name that's...