10. CONCATENATE: Startup and investor excel model training

How do you stick things together? Glue. Yeah, no shit. In excel one kind of glue is called CONCATENATE. Why it couldn’t be GLUE() I don’t know, but anyway, yeah. Concatenate is suprisingly handy. It’s not a daily function, but it has it’s uses for text manipulation.

Intro to Excel model training

This is part of a series on Excel model training focused on helping founders and investors to actually enjoy and get proficient in excel. It’s such an important skill to have, and there’s no excuse to not be able to do all the ‘advanced’ stuff, let alone the basics.

This is a pragmatic course where you will only learn the most useful things; those that I actually use regularly. We’ll go through the obvious applications, but also include some hacks I’ve developed over the years.

To get the excel example for this and all the other instalments, subscribe with the pretty box on the right and you’ll get the excel tip of the day sent directly to your inbox. Within a month and ten minutes practice, you’ll be a boss in no time.

You can join up to the training here.

What’s the point of CONCATENATE?

Let’s say you export a list of URLs from Google Analytics and they come without https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/. Well you could easily write a simple function which would stick the base URL before the permalink structure GA feeds you… Bet you would do that manually or… if you’re smart attempt to do some king of find and replace thing and just end up frustrated…

Well listen up. CONCATENATE is useful AND easy (Oh look, my first Excel joke. FML).

How do I do these things you speak of?

You don’t want to read an essay, and this isn’t hard so let’s get through this.

Just type: CONCATENATE(STUFF, MORE STUFF) and then the stuff is squished together.

For example: CONCATENATE(“This is the “,CHOOSE(A1,”Best “,”Worst “),”post of all time”)

If A1 = 1, then this would say This is the Best post of all time.

Pretty cool huh.

Now we are going to do a real example from Lazada where I taught some of the EIRs Excel so they could analyse their data set properly.

It involved combining parts of a database export to create URLs and figure out where there was data missing in the database, namely if a City was not in the database (and needed to be). So get the Excel file open and do the exercise.