How to Join Text from Several Cells in Excel using TEXTJOIN

I wrote an article a few years ago about how you can join data from different columns, and add a comma between each part. It was quite tricky, especially if we had some empty cells, so we ended up with a long formula with SUBSTITUTE, TRIM and CONCATENATE.

If you have Excel 2019 or Office 365, there is an easier way: The TEXTJOIN function.

Here’s the same dataset that I used in the previous article, and the result we want in the column to the right:

READ MORE

Create random text strings and line breaks with the CHAR function

How to generate a string of random letters in Excel

The CHAR function returns a character that corresponds to the number in the character set used by your computer (ANSI for Windows). There are up to 255 different characters in the set, with the capital letters from A-Z starting at number 65. Z is 90. To generate a random letter you can use the RANDBETWEEN function:

READ MORE

Join cells in Excel and remove excess commas between elements

EDIT: If you are using Excel 2019 or Office 365 you can use the TEXTJOIN function to solve this problem. Click here for the new article:

How to Join Text from Several Cells in Excel using TEXTJOIN

Unclean data can cause a lot of problems in Excel. In this post I will show how you can join data from different columns with a comma between them. That’s the easy part. The problem occurs when you have empty cells in your data, like in the table below. The result of the first row looks fine, but if you look at the rows with empty cells, you get too many commas:

EasyExcel_41_1_Join with concatenate and trim



READ MORE

Convert numbers to Thai text with the BAHTTEXT function (?)

Everybody knows that you can do amazing things with Excel, but who would imagine a function like BAHTTEXT? According to Microsoft, this function “Converts a number to Thai text and adds a suffix of Baht.” There are no functions that convert numbers to text in any other language, so why Microsoft chose to develop this function remains a mystery. I’m guessing that one of the developers did it to impress someone who speaks Thai…

Sadly, I don’t speak a word of Thai, so in order to determine whether or not the BAHTTEXT function is good enough to impress anyone, I checked the results in Google Translate. This is what I got:

READ MORE

Use Excel to Count Words

In Word you can easily count the words simply by clicking “Word Count” from the Review ribbon. But what if you have your text in Excel? There is no built-in word count function in Excel, so we have to find another way.

In a previous post I showed how to count characters in a text string using the LEN function. We will use the same function, with a twist, to do a word count.

READ MORE

How to use Excel to Count Characters in a Text String

We often need to measure the length of a text, for example if we write a text that will appear on a website. Typically, in a web shop the product introduction text has to be of a certain length in order to fit within the frames.

Of course, the easiest way to do this is in Excel. This is extremely easy – it only takes a few seconds:

READ MORE