
If you delete the original, separated cells, then the data in the combined cell will be deleted as well. The steps below are going to use the concatenate function to combine a cell with a first name and a cell with a last name into one cell. This is the syntax to create the new string composed of the first name ( A1 ), then a space ( ' ' ), then the last name ( B1 ). Merge First and Last Name Cells Into One Cell in Excel 2013.

These two were the methods we found to be the simplest and most applicable to all. In the first cell of column D we write CONCAT (A1, ' ', B1). There are plenty of other ways in Excel, like using VB script, or the TEXTJOIN function (available in newer versions and Office 365). Merge Cells in the usual way you often use Merge &038 Center directly to merge cells in Excel, this will result in cells with. It’s important to note though, that these are not the only two ways to do this. In this tutorial, we showed you two ways in which you can combine first and last names into a single column in Excel. So, even if you delete the original two columns containing first and last names respectively, the combined column remains unaffected. Since this method doesn’t involve a formula, it doesn’t depend on the original columns. In the same way, you can also set the pattern to have the last name followed by a comma, followed by the first name. Finally, we concatenated the value in C2 (the last name). We followed this by a dot operator and space. Here, we specified that if cell B2 is not blank (that means if a middle name exists), we want just the first character from the cell B2.

The LEFT() function takes the specified number of characters starting from the left side of the text in a cell.

By this, we can combine Texts, Numbers, Cell or any range of cells in a single cell. If you want to have the first name, followed by the middle name’s initial, followed by the last name, then your formula in D2 can be =CONCATENATE(A2,IF(B2=””,” “,” “&LEFT(B2,1)&”.”),C2). Combine First and Last Name in Excel Example 2 Another method of combining the First name and Last name is Concatenation in excel.If you have a first name, last name, and a middle name in cells A2, B2, and C2 respectively, your formula in D2 can be =CONCATENATE(A2,” “,B2,” “,C2).You can replace the separating character with any character you need.So for this example, C3 would have the formula: =CONCATENATE(B2,”, “,A2) Also, replace the first cell reference with the second cell reference and vice-versa. If you want to put the last name followed by a comma, followed by the first name, then instead of a space, put a comma within quotes.
