Excel Snippets: CONCAT Function

I might not post many Excel snippets, but I’m collecting them into a small Excel Snippets series to make them easy to find.

CONCAT is the modern replacement for the CONCATENATE function, which has been deprecated. CONCAT works in the same way but adds the ability to reference entire ranges of cells, making it far more practical when joining many values.

The syntax is straightforward:

=CONCAT(text1, [text2], ...)

text1, text2, ... are the values, cell references, or ranges to join together. You can supply up to 254 arguments, and each argument can itself be a range.

To join a first name in A2 and a surname in B2 with a space between them:

=CONCAT(A2, " ", B2)

The & operator produces the same result and many people find it easier to read for simple cases:

=A2&" "&B2

Unlike CONCATENATE, CONCAT accepts a range. To join all values in A2:A5 without any separator:

=CONCAT(A2:A5)

CONCAT does not add any delimiter between values; if you need a separator between each cell in a range, use TEXTJOIN instead, which supports both a delimiter and the option to skip blanks.

CONCATENATE still works in current versions of Excel for backward compatibility, but Microsoft recommends using CONCAT going forward. CONCAT is available in Excel 2019, Excel 2021, and Microsoft 365.