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

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: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday November 27 2018, @11:16PM

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Tuesday November 27 2018, @11:16PM (#767079)

    And if, like most companies, you already have invested in highly complex Excel spreadsheets you're going to have one hell of a time convincing management to even try to allocate the resources needed to port them to Calc.

    That's always been the claim, but in the examples I've seen almost invariably the spreadsheets were complex only because they were so poorly designed in the first place. Usually they were the product of a single individual entrenched in their position, and I often wondered if the spreadsheets were so muddled solely to make the creator look more irreplaceable.

    There's just too much time invested in MS Office to make it in any way practical to move everyone to something that will require retraining all their employees,

    Another common claim that does not hold up. Most users would hardly know the difference, especially if you changed the Excel icon on their desktop to link to LibreOffice. They might put it off to another upgrade, ask a few questions if they can't find something, but few would require significant if any retraining.

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