Concatenate Columns Into a Single Field
We're just warming up the Strata blog right now, but we going to be adding various tips and tricks on how to use the software more effectively. One aspect of this will be to discuss general support questions we receive that have relevance to many users.
So, along those lines, we received a question the other day about concatenating fields together into a single string. Excel has a CONCATENATE function that will let you take two non-numeric columns and place them together. Here's an example from the Excel help manual:
CONCATENATE("Total ", "Value") equals "Total Value"
Strata makes this even easier, since no function is required to concatenate or join strings together. You simply need to add them together:
"Total " + "Value" equals "Total Value"
So, say you had a table with a first name field (”firstname”) and a last name field (”lastname”) and wanted to put these together. You would insert a new calculated field and enter the following formula:
firstname + lastname
So, if a record had “John” in the firstname field and “Smith” in the lastname field, you would get a result of:
JohnSmith
The spacing is obviously problematic here, so we just need to add in a space for formatting purposes:
firstname + " " + lastname
which would result in:
John Smith
So, to sum up, no concatenate function is necessary when using Strata… just add your strings together.
August 6th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
[…] do certain things. You'll find these in spreadsheets — in fact, we previously wrote a post about the Concatenate function in Excel. Strata has a bunch of different functions that you can explore in more detail. […]
September 20th, 2012 at 9:26 am
I run Excel courses in the UK and we don't include Concatenate in any of them. I'm now going to add the feature into our Intermediate level course - many thanks for the post!