I like to joke that if my husband I have a 6th child (won’t happen, we are 50) we will name her concatenate and call her cat for short.
In other words, one of my favorite spreadsheet tricks is to concatenate data. But what does that mean?! It means you will join information together. Such as, you have a column with first name, and a column with last name… but what if you need last, first?
2 Ways to Concatenate
&
Let’s start with my favorite way to concatenate … with the ampersand symbol &
If you have first name in column A and last name in column B then
=B2&", "&A2
will give you last, first.
=CONCATENATE()
The obvious first problem with this method is you have to remember how to spell Concatenate 
. The other issue is look how many characters it is. 1 character compared to 13 characters. But… no shaming, this is a good method also.
=CONCATENATE(B2, ", ", A2)
So in this example, the ampersand looks like the clear winner. However, if you want to join a range of cells together … then this method would probably be preferred.
=CONCATENATE(A5:A19)
Using CONCATENATE in Tiller
Because I am such a spreadsheet nerd I have definitely used CONCATENATE in my Tiller spreadsheet. What ways have you used it?
You can use concatenation to build a “Narrative” column. This column can combine different data points to form a sentence or a clear label that makes sense to you. For example, you might want to see the Merchant Name combined with the Category to give you immediate context when scanning a list.
Imagine creating a formula that says: ="Paid " & [Amount] & " at " & [Description] & " for " & [Category].
*(Replace the [Column Name] in the formula with the cell reference. For example ="Paid "&E3& " at " &B3& " for " & D3
Note that concatenating numbers does not bring the dollar formatting with it and you’ll likely have a lot of decimals to manage. Use TEXT around any cell reference that contains numbers that you want to format.
="Paid " &TEXT( [Amount] ,“$0.00”)& " at " & [Description] & " for " & [Category]
Suppose you have a column for “Category” and a column for “Tags.” You can create a reporting column that joins them with a separator, such as a colon or a vertical bar. If you categorize a dinner as “Restaurants” and tag it “#Anniversary,” your joining formula creates “Restaurants | #Anniversary.”
You can then build pivot tables or query reports based on this combined column. It allows you to roll up data to the high-level “Restaurants” category when you want to see the big picture, while still preserving the ability to drill down into the specific “Restaurants | #Anniversary” data point when you want to reminisce about that special meal.
Share your CONCATENATE uses!
-Alice
Tiller Evangelist