OK, so it looks like an excel formula, and you would be right. Why, you may ask, am I writing about this? I love simple solutions to things, techniques that make long laborious tasks much more manageable. Recently, I was given a spreadsheet at work and charged with the task of putting a couple of columns together and adding some text to form a filename that would be used for a whole list of web images (in the end, more than 8000 items). The filenames in the spreadsheet had to match the real files or else things would start breaking. Rather than spend the next 4 weeks typing each name up and matching it to the image file I decided to make use of a formula that has recently become indispensable in my virtual toolkit…”=concatenate”. Simply this formula allows you to take both cell values and text strings and put them together in a new cell.
Here’s my example…nerdy as it may look.
you have 3 columns of information that needs to be combined into a filename with each piece separated with and “_” and the “.jpg” file extension at the end. Here’s how to do it. The formula looks like this: =CONCATENATE(A2,”_”,B2,”_”,C2,”.jpg”)
Enough of that nerdiness…for now…
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