Hi, Tim Maybury here again with another Microsoft Excel tip useful for managing marketing information. I use this one in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook mail merge and my father’s Productivity Pointer emails. This time I’m going to show you how to combine data in 2 or more columns into a new column. I hope you find it useful, let me know if you do – and tell me the tips you use for managing data in Excel, I’d love to learn from you. 

OK, this is relatively straightforward. Let’s assume you want to combine a column of First Names in column A with a column of Family Names in column B to produce a full Contact name in Column C – here’s how:

  1. If necessary add a new blank column to the right of the fields you want to combine. Do this by Right-Clicking on the column C header
  2. Type the following into Cell C1. Before you do so, it is important to note that the quotation marks you use must be the double ones (usually above the ‘2’ key) Oh, and don’t forget the = sign or the space between the quotation marks! ……     =A1&” “&B1 
  3. To make the formula apply to the whole column simply hover your cursor over the small square in the bottom right of your cell C1 and drag it to the last cell of data you want to manage.
  4. In Excel this is called CONCATENATE, but you don’t need to know that.

Have you seen my post on how to convert a column of email address in Excel to formatted email addresses in Outlook?

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