How to join
3 Columns In Excel
How to merge multiple columns into a single column using Microsoft Excel
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hello and welcome to strictly virtual
today's tutorial is merging data from
multiple columns into a single column in
Microsoft Excel now Microsoft Excel
comes with a merge cells feature but the
problem with this is it only retains the
data in the leftmost cell that you merge
so if you're merging two or more cells
with data in them then you'll lose the
data from all of the cells apart from
the leftmost cell so it's not much use
if you want to retain that data so we're
going to be using the concatenate
function today so we've got two columns
of data column a with first names and
column B with surnames and we're going
to merge these fields into column C so
first thing to do is to highlight a cell
c2 c2 because we don't want to merge the
header row so as I said highlight cell
c2 and then click up in your formula bar
type in equals and then concatenate you
then need an opening bracket and then
we'll select our first set of data which
is a2 so you can either type in a2 or
just click on it then you want comma and
then click on b2 and a closing bracket
and hit enter so you can see now that
our data is merged into column C however
as it's a name we need a space in
between the first name and the surname
so hit back back on up to your formula
bar and click in just after the comma
and type in quotation space quotation
comma and hit Enter
and now you can see our data is nicely
formatted with a space in between so if
you want to apply that to all of your
rows then just hover over the bottom
right corner of the cell until you get
the plus sign and left click and drag it
down so that's pretty much how you do
that but what about if you've got data
in more than two columns so let's just
get rid of this here and we'll add
another column and we'll call it age and
we'll just type in some ages here so
we're going to now merge this data into
column D but we'd like quite nice
formatting so we're going to add in some
spacing and a hyphen between the name
and the age so head back 1 up to your
formula bar and again type in the equal
sign and concatenate opening bracket and
select your first cell again a2 and
comma and then we want to add our
spacing straightaway so quotation space
quotation comma and then b2 comma now
for our age we're going to add a space
before the - so it's quotation space
quotation comma and then quotation -
quotation comma and then we're going to
stick a space afterwards as well so
quotation space quotation comma and then
we just need our age column so click on
cell c2 to add that in closing bracket
and hit enter
so now we've got outdated with the aged
nicely formatted and again we can just
hover over the bottom right corner and
drag this down to get all of our rows so
that's pretty much it just one word of
warning that this data now is dependent
on the first three columns so if you
change anything in these columns then
your data is going to change too so the
way to get around that if you want to
keep that dejan it not be dependent on
those columns is a simple copy and paste
so just select your cells hit copy and
decide where you want to paste them can
be anywhere same worksheet different
worksheet or just the next column and
then hit paste and paste values so now
we've got our data there but it's no
longer dependent on the previous column
so if we change that age to 98 you'll
see that the first column of data column
D will change because it's dependent on
the first cells column e will not change
because it's standalone so that's
basically it hope you enjoyed the
tutorial for more tips tricks and how-to
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