Concatenation and You

As I have previously mentioned, Concatenation is one of my favorite time savers. Teaching classes as large as 200 students, I have frequent use for sending emails to large groups. 

Not surprisingly, I always make a spreadsheet of my students’ names (this could also work for you company employee, of course). When it comes to sending emails to the group, I have found that Concatenation is the perfect solution!

Assume that you have a list of students with the First Names in Column A and Last Names in Column B. With concatenation, you can easily combine them into an Email-Friendly column of names in a “Last Name, First Name” format. The secret to Concatenation is using Ampersands and cell references combined with quoted text or punctuation. Here’s how to do it:

Assuming your table starts in cell A1, put the following formula in C1 (Note: There must be a space after the comma in quotation marks):

=B1&", "&A1

This elementary formula combines the contents of B1 (last name) with a comma, space, and contents of A1 (first name). Select C1, place your cursor over the “handle” in the lower-right corner of the cell, and give a quick double-click. This will populate your Column C Email List down as far as you have data in Columns A and B.

Then it is a simple matter of copying the contents of Column C, and pasting into Outlook. Bamm! You have just saved you time that you can use doing something useful (like Golf…)!