Lesson 4: Getting practical

We’ve seen functions that use numbers, now let’s look at another type of function: text functions. They are functions that take text as input or that result in text output (or usually both).

Before we get to the exercise, you need to know something about text in Excel formulas. Texts in Excel formulas are almost always surrounded by double quotes “. That’s just the way to let Excel know that it is a text.

Concatenate first and last names exercise

For the fourth of our Excel beginner exercises, we will be combining the contents of two cells. The first cell will have a first name, the second cell will have a last name in it. We would like to fill the third cell with the first name, then a space and then the last name.

We can do this using the CONCATENATE function. The CONCATENATE function looks like this: =CONCATENATE("text1","text2","text3"). If we would run this function, it would result in text1text2text3. So it just combines the texts that you give it.

This exercise has a couple of first names in cells A1:A8 (A1 up to and including A8) and last names in cells B1:B8.

You complete the exercise if you can use the CONCATENATE function in cell C8 to combine the first name in cell A8 with a space and then the last name from cell B8.

So the answer should be in cell C8. The other rows are just for you to practice in.