Batch string concatenation in Excel

Question

I have a couple hundred of cells in Excel I would like to concatenate into a single string. Is there a simpler method of doing this than going through them one by one manual

Answer 1

If your looking for a pure Excel approach (ie no VBA) then the method proposed by James Jenkins is best. If you are happy using VBA then open up the VBA editor, add a new module, and add this code:

Option Explicit

Public Function JoinText(cells As Variant,Optional delim_str As String) As String
    If cells.Columns.count < cells.Rows.count Then
       JoinText = Join(WorksheetFunction.Transpose(cells), delim_str)
    Else
       JoinText = Join(WorksheetFunction.Transpose(WorksheetFunction.Transpose(cells)), delim_str)
    End If
End Function

To open the VBA editor easily press Alt-F11. To insert a module you right-click on the workbook listed in the 'Project' window.

The function is called from excel as follows:

=JoinText(A1:C1)

If you want to add a delimiter (eg comma):

=JoinText(A1:C1,",")

The purpose of using the transpose function is to turn the 2d array, 'cells', into a 1d array. The reson for this is that the VBA function Join only accepts a 1d array. The reason for using two of them is if JoinText is looking at a row of cells (which is still just a 2d array) then the first call to transpose, transposes this 2d row array into a 2d column array, the second call turns it into a 1d array.