By the way, you still need to select each cell one-by-one because the function doesn’t support ranges. CONCATENATE function doesn’t provide any advantage for the most part, unless you need to merge 100 strings and do not want to use the ampersand (&) character 99 times. The CONCATENATE Function is available but does not take ranges of cells as inputs or allow array operations and so we are required to use a helper column with an IF. However, you can do the exact same thing by using an ampersand (&) character between the strings or texts. As the CONCAT and TEXTJOIN Functions are not available before the Excel 2019 version, we need to solve this problem in a different way. Values may be supplied as cell references, and hard-coded text strings. The CONCATENATE function accepts multiple arguments called text1, text2, text3, etc. In Excel 2019 and later, the CONCAT function and TEXTJOIN function are better, more flexible alternatives. One of them is by using the ampersand sign (&) and the other way is to use the CONCATENATE function. The CONCATENATE function concatenates (joins) join up to 30 values together and returns the result as text. The CONCATENATE function simply merges its parameters, and returns a string value. When working with Excel, you probably noticed that there are two methods of joining strings. Let's begin with the older formula ( CONCATENATE) first and see why you might want to prefer using the CONCAT function instead. In this guide, we are going to focus on the CONCAT function and look at some of the differences between the CONCAT vs CONCATENATE functions. The easiest way to add a text string to a cell is to use an ampersand character (&), which is the concatenation operator in Excel. Recently, Microsoft has released the CONCAT and TEXTJOIN formulas with Excel 2016. To add a specific character or text to an Excel cell, simply concatenate a string and a cell reference by using one of the following methods. For a long time, the only option to combine text strings has been using the CONCATENATEfunction, which does nothing more than what the ampersand (&) operator does.