How to Use Excel’s CONCATENATE Function: Combine Text with Spaces and Line Breaks

About the CONCATENATE Function

Overview of CONCATENATE

Combine Text Strings Excel Function/Text Operations

=CONCATENATE(Text1, Text2, Text3,…) Summary: Combines multiple text strings separated by commas.

You can also use the & operator to concatenate text: =(Text1 & Text2). Concatenation with the + operator results in a #VALUE! error, as it is not valid for text strings: CONCATENATE(Text1, Text2) (Text1 & Text2) (Text1 + Text2) Text1 Text2 Text1Text2 Text1Text2 #VALUE! You can directly concatenate quoted text strings using commas. Blank cells are included in the concatenation without modification. CONCATENATE does not support range-based concatenation (e.g., A1:A5). Use CONCAT (available in Excel 2019+) for that functionality. For specifying delimiters, use TEXTJOIN, which is available in Excel 365. Because Office 2016 is still widely used, CONCATENATE is a better choice for compatibility when sharing Excel files.

When to Use CONCATENATE

• To combine multiple strings into one.
• To merge first and last names into a single cell.
• To join city and state names from separate cells into one cell.

How to Use CONCATENATE

	A	B	C	D	E
1		John	Doe	JohnDoe =CONCATENATE(B1, C1) =(B1 & C1) can also be used.
2
3

Combining Dates with CONCATENATE

• Combining dates directly with CONCATENATE will result in the date’s serial value being concatenated. For example, “44978” (2/21/2023) and “44979” (2/22/2023) will result in “4497844979”.
• To display formatted dates, use the TEXT function to convert them into strings before concatenation: =TEXT(A1, “mm/dd/yyyy”).

Combining Strings with Line Breaks

• Insert line breaks using CHAR(10) as part of the concatenation formula.
• Ensure the target cell has “Wrap Text” enabled (Home → Alignment → Wrap Text).

Limitations of CONCATENATE

• CONCATENATE cannot concatenate ranges (e.g., A1:A5). Use CONCAT for this.
• CONCATENATE has a character limit of 255 characters. If exceeded, split the concatenation into smaller chunks.