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Microsoft to Silently Remove the CONCATENATE Function from Excel, Offers Paid Alternative: CONCAT

posted by martyb on Monday November 26 2018, @02:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the putting-it-all-together dept.

deimios writes:

If you've ever tried to use the CONCATENATE function in Microsoft Excel to merge the values in a range of cells, you know it doesn't work unless you add each cell to the function, one by one.

You might have noticed the following message in the support article for CONCATENATE:

Important: In Excel 2016, Excel Mobile, and Excel Online, this function has been replaced with the CONCAT function. Although the CONCATENATE function is still available for backward compatibility, you should consider using CONCAT from now on. This is because CONCATENATE may not be available in future versions of Excel.

Meet the alternatives: CONCAT and TEXTJOIN

for CONCAT and TEXTJOIN:

Note: This feature is not available in Excel 2016 unless you have an Office 365 subscription. If you are an Office 365 subscriber, make sure you have the latest version of Office.

While it is admirable that Microsoft is finally fixing some of the idiosyncrasies of its software, I fear the future will bring a level of fragmentation unseen since the office 2003 to 2007 switch.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 27 2018, @08:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 27 2018, @08:02PM (#767020)

    I didn't even know about those CONCAT(ENATE) functions, I've always used the ampersand symbol to join text in Excel at work. I stick to LibreOffice on my personal machines (where I also use ampersand). Perhaps I've never had to do anything so complex that I needed to use the proper concatenate functions - ampersand has always worked, though I might use more scratch cells/columns for intermediate values for complex joining, which makes debugging easier than a single massive formula anyway.