One of my colleagues was setting up around 400 student accounts for the new year today. He had an Excel spreadsheet with Firstname and Lastname in seperate cells A and B and needed to add two more columns with the students login name (cell C) and email address (cell D).

At first he thought this would have to be a manual process until I showed him how to join multiple cells in Microsoft Excel using the CONCATENATE function. The login name had to take the format firstname.lastname and the email address had to be in the format firstname.lastname@schoolname.school.nz.

The CONCATENATE function allows you to join the contents of two or more cells, and also allows you to add text or characters when doing so.

The end result was that cell C1 was referenced using =CONCATENATE(A1,”.”,B1) for Firstname.Lastname, and cell D1 was referenced using =CONCATENATE(A1,”.”,B1,”@schoolname.school.nz”)