Google Sheets 101: Joining Text

You’ve separated, manipulated, rearranged, and calculated your data… now you might need to put it all back together again.

This happens when the data needs to be in a specific format or it’s just easier to send it in an email as one line of text.

Here’s some separated data:

For whatever reason, you need this data as a single piece of text.

TEXTJOIN function to the rescue!

TEXTJOIN

TEXTJOIN takes multiple pieces of data and joins them together by placing a delimiter in between.

Syntax

• delimiter = the text you want in between the data points
• ignore_empty = true or false setting that determines if empty text entered is ignored (TRUE) or included (FALSE)
• text1 = a single piece of data, an array of data, a cell reference, or range reference
• [text2, ...] = optional additional data to join together

Example

Let’s use the TEXTJOIN function to join the above data (which is in cells A1:A4) using a space as the delimiter:

Here’s the output:

That’s not as clear as you might want it so let’s change the delimiter to a comma and a space:

Here’s the output:

Much better.

Now let’s think about a situation in which some of your data is incomplete:

John’s email address is missing.

If we use the same function on this data we get:

This is less than ideal as if you have a lot of data you might not notice this and it doesn’t look right.

Instead, we can choose to ignore the empty fields and use:

To get:

Perfect.

Your turn:

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