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Comments on Combine the first character of a cell with another cell

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Combine the first character of a cell with another cell

−1

A Q on Stack Exchange from a very long time ago included:

I have first names in one column and second names in another, I want to create a third column that contains the first character from the first name and add it to the surname creating first initial + surname.

The user asked "How can I do this using Excel?" and gave this example:

John & Smith = jsmith

So far there have been six As posted, of which only one seems fully to respect the given requirements (though it was another A that was 'Accepted'):

=CONCATENATE(LOWER(MID(A1,1,1)),LOWER( B1))

This makes standard assumptions about the location of the data (A1 for first name, B1 for surname) and the delimiter (comma).

The formula works but seems uncharacteristically lengthy for such a simple requirement, and is perhaps more opaque than necessary.

Is there a shorter and/or clearer formula to the same effect?

excel text spreadsheet-formula

posted about 4 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

1y ago by ArtOfCode‭

pnuts‭

407 reputation 21 14 8 46

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is a duplicate

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not constructive

This question cannot be answered in a way that is helpful to anyone. It's not possible to learn something from possible answers, except for the solution for the specific problem of the asker.

1 comment thread

Simplify? (1 comment)

matthewsnyder‭ wrote over 1 year ago · edited over 1 year ago

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The title says "combine the first character with another cell" but then in the example you are also doing case changes. The case change really doesn't have anything to do with the concatenation. IMO conflating two separate questions like this into one confuses things, and makes the question less useful for people who are only looking for a way to concatenate without lowercasing.

I would recommend editing the question to be about doing John, Smith = JSmith. If you need help about converting to lowercase, that should be a separate question ("how to change a cell to lowercase"). If both of these are obvious to you, but you're asking about optimizing how your functions are composed, well - the title doesn't say that, so maybe it should. I'm happy to post an answer to either of these questions.