Although most formulas only mathematically manipulate values, it turns out that you can also have text formulas. Obviously, you can't add two pieces of text together. But what you can do is concatenate, or moosh together, two or more pieces of text. To do this, you use the concatenation operator, &. This chapter won't spend much time on this concatenation business because it's pretty simple. Just take a look at the next table, which illustrates how the concatenation operator works:
|
Text Formula |
What It Returns |
|
="White"&"house" |
Whitehouse |
|
=A1&A2 |
Whitehouse (if cell A1 holds the label White and cell A2 holds the label house) |
|
="Agatha"&" "&"Christie" |
Agatha Christie |
Notice, by the way, that the third text formula actually concatenates three chunks of text: the name "Agatha," a space enclosed in quotation marks, and the name "Christie."