Instead you select the range, for example =CONCAT(K14:O14).Ī better choice in this situation, however, would be the TEXTJOIN function, which allows you to specify a separator and allows you to ignore empty cells so that you don't end up with extra separatorsĪnother example of where TEXTJOIN is useful is when building a list of items from separate cells, where you can use ',' as your separator.Īlternative ways of stringing text together (also known as concatenating) are: The advantage of this method of joining pieces of text is that you don't have to identify each cell you want included individually. The only snag here is that there are no spaces between the names, so you would need to insert columns in between containing just a space for it to work. So, suppose you had first names, middle names and surnames of people arranged across 3 columns, you could CONCAT these together to spell out the full names of the people. It's easier to see this in practice in our download file, but here is some explanation too: These functions are for stringing together pieces of text across a range of cells. Here are some examples of how these can be used in practice: In the meantime, the full list of new functions currently available only in Excel 365 or Excel 2019 is: CONCAT, IFS, MINIFS, MAXIFS, SWITCH, TEXTJOIN and some specialist FORECAST functions. You need to make sure that your file only uses functions that are compatible with the earliest version of Excel that the people who open your file have. As always, if you want to share a spreadsheet with users who are not on Excel 2019 (or 365) then do not use the new functions.If you have Microsoft 365/Office 365 but you are using an earlier version than Windows 10, then you won’t have all of the new Excel 2019 features.It is compatible only with Windows 10 onwards (or Mac). Excel 2019 is not compatible with Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1.If you have Microsoft 365 (what was called Office 365) then you will probably already have the new Excel functions for 2019 now.

We’ll write up more about these new features once we have experience of using them in practice.Ī couple of big points to note now though are: Excel 2019 has a few new features coming, including some new handy functions which will probably be the newcomers that you are most likely to use.

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