Excel Concatenate With Quotes Made Easy

Excel is an incredibly powerful tool for managing and analyzing data, but sometimes, even the most basic tasks can be frustrating. One such task is concatenating text strings with quotes in Excel. Whether you're working with data from a database, a web scrape, or simply trying to format text for a report, concatenating text with quotes can be a challenge. In this article, we'll explore the different ways to concatenate text with quotes in Excel, making it easy for you to get the job done.

Excel's Concatenation Function: A Brief Overview

Before we dive into the specifics of concatenating text with quotes, let's take a quick look at Excel's concatenation function. The CONCATENATE function, also represented by the ampersand (&) symbol, is used to combine two or more text strings into a single string. The syntax for the CONCATENATE function is as follows:

CONCATENATE(text1, text2,...)

Or, using the ampersand symbol:

=text1 & text2 &...

Using Double Quotes in Concatenation

When working with text strings that contain double quotes, things can get a bit tricky. Double quotes are used to enclose text strings in Excel, so when you want to include double quotes within a text string, you need to use a technique called "escaping" the quotes.

One way to escape double quotes is to use two double quotes in a row, like this:

=text1 & """" & text2

This will insert a single double quote into the concatenated text string.

Using Single Quotes in Concatenation

Single quotes are a bit easier to work with than double quotes, but they still require some special handling. To include a single quote in a concatenated text string, you can use the CHAR function to insert the single quote character.

=text1 & CHAR(39) & text2

The CHAR function returns the character specified by the code number, which in this case is 39, the code number for a single quote.

Using the TEXTJOIN Function

Excel 2016 and later versions include a new function called TEXTJOIN, which makes it easier to concatenate text strings with a specified separator. The TEXTJOIN function can also handle text strings with quotes.

=TEXTJOIN(" ", TRUE, text1, text2,...)