Excel concatenate() is seriously crippled, it can add 2 or more strings together, as long as they are supplied as separate parameters. This means, when you have a range of cells with text which you want to add up to create a large text, you need to write an ugly looking biggish concatenate() or use ‘&’ operator over and again.
I felt bored enough the other day to write a better concatenate(), one that can accept a range as input and output one text with all the contents of the input range. What more you can use this to delimit the input range with your own favorite character.
For example, if each of the 7 cells in a1:a7 have “a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, “e”, “f”, “g”, if you want to add all of them up using concatenate you would have to write concatenate(a1,a2,a3,a4,a5,a6,a7) which can be painful if you are planning to do this over a large range or something.
Instead, you can use concat(a1:a7) by installing the UDF (User defined function) I have written. Its nothing miraculous or anything, it just does the dirty job of going through the range for you. If you want to delimit the input range with a comma just use concat(a1:a7,",") to get the out of a,b,c,d,e,f,g Just download the concat() UDF excel add-in and double click on it to install it. If you are little weary of installing UDFs / Macros from third parties, copy past the below excel code in a new sheet’s VB editor and save the sheet as an excel addin (.xla extension)
Added on Aug 26, 2008: I have updated the code, copy it again if you have the old one
Function concat(useThis As Range, Optional delim As String) As String
' this function will concatenate a range of cells and return one string
' useful when you have a rather large range of cells that you need to add up
Dim retVal, dlm As String
retVal = ""
If delim = Null Then
dlm = ""
Else
dlm = delim
End If
For Each cell In useThis
if cstr(cell.value)<>"" and cstr(cell.value)<>" " then
retVal = retVal & cstr(cell.Value) & dlm
end if
Next
If dlm <> "" Then
retVal = Left(retVal, Len(retVal) - Len(dlm))
End If
concat = retVal
End Function
Did you find this useful? Are you looking for some other excel UDFs as well, drop a comment, I am a busy coffee drinker, but between the sips I can whip out ugly looking but functional vb code 😛
3 Responses to “Filter one table if the value is in another table (Formula Trick)”
What about the opposite? I want a list of products without sales or customers with no orders. So I would exclude the ones that are on the other table.
Good question. You can check for the =0 as countifs result. for example,
=FILTER(orders, COUNTIFS(products, orders[Product])=0)
should work in this case.
PS: I have added this example to the article now.
Hi there!
Could i check if there was a way to return certain fields of the table only?
so based off your example above, i would like to continue to use the 'Products" table as a way to filter out items from my "Orders" table, but only want to show maybe only the "Product" and "Order Value" fields, rather than all 5 fields (sales person, customer, product, date, order value).