Catentate or cotentate

[Guest]

I am sorry if I am spelling the term incorrectly. There is a function in
Excel where you can combine or seperate names. For example in spreadsheet
colum each cell has the first and last name of a person and one needs to
separate them so that the first name appears in one column and the last name
in the oter column cell. Also if one needs to combine the two cell names in
to one cell. Help appreicated.

 

[daddylonglegs]

You can use the concatenate function to join text fron two cells in one,
e.g. if you have "John" in A1 and "Smith" in B1 use this formula in C1

=CONCATENATE(A1," ",B1)

or you can achieve the same with & i.e.

=A1&" "&B1

If you want to do the reverse, separate text in one cell into two, then
look at using Data > Text to Columns

 

[Dave Peterson]

=Concatenate() combines things together.

=concatenate(a1,b9)
or
=concatenate(a1," ",b9)

But you can use the & (ampersand) operator, too:

=a1&b9
=a1&" "&b9

To split stuff up, you can use formulas that look for the space between words or
you can use a non-formula approach: Data|Text to columns.

=LEFT(A1,SEARCH(" ",A1)-1)
will pick off the stuff in A1 before the first space character.
=MID(A1,SEARCH(" ",A1)+1,LEN(A1))
will pick up the stuff after the first space character.

If you have a whole column of two word cells to split, data|text to columns is
pretty quick!