la_bon wrote:
I have searched with no luck. I need to combine text from 2 cells to create new text. Example: first name and last name into one cell. This seems so basic and I can't find the code to make this happen. Can anyone help please?
I can understand not knowing to search for "concatenate" 🙂
Yvan has answered the actual question. Here's a note on searching:
In your subject line, you've defined in two words what you want to do: combine text.
Searching the iWork Formulas and Functions guide using both words gives zero results. That just means those two words don't occur together (ie. in that order and separated by only a space) in the guide.
Next step: Try only one of the words. I usually start with the noun. Searching 'text' brings 181 occurrences (pretty big haystack!), but fortunately, the first few come in the Table of contents. And the first two—both "Text Functions"—look promising,
In the main window, Preview has already taken you to the page on which these two occur, and has highlighted the first one: "306 Chapter 11: Text Functions"
Right underneath that is the TOC list of all the Text Functions supported in numbers '09. There are 22 of them—more manageable than the 181 hits for the search term—and for most of them, the function name makes it pretty clear what the function does. You can eliminate almost all of them right away, and go straight to any one that looks promising. Or you could go straight to the chapter (click the "Chapter 11:" line), where the list is repeated, this time with brief explanations of what each function does. Clicking on any of the function names will take you to the page where there's a more detailed discussion of the function and some examples of how to use that function in formulas.
Alternate route: You might instead, start with the verb. 'combine' returns only 8 results (a more manageable number!), but none look very useful, even if you drag the column separators to expose more of the context around each of the occurrences. Here it's useful to look at the last column in the results window, which tells what Section of the guide the word was found in. None of them look useful, but IF you weren't sure and wanted to take a quick look at one, Click on it—the list will remain in the results window, but the view in the main window will go to the page for the result you clicked.
None of the results for 'combine' are what you want, though. Next step: Is there another verb that could describe what you want to do? Perhaps 'join'?
Bingo! 'join' returns only two results, and both are exactly what you need. The first is to the list of Text Functions mentioned above, the second to the detailed description and examples for the CONCATENATION function, later in the chapter.
That's pretty much what I did in searching this topic, except I thought 'text' would give too many results, so I started with the verb, then tried the synonym. Turned out to be successful, but no more so than starting with 'text' then scanning the contents page, then going to the list of text functions at the beginning of the chapter.
Hope this helps with your future searches.
Regards,
Barry
