Re: Swaping and merging two columns

[brownh hartford-hwp com (Haines Brown)]

> Haines Brown said:
>
> > However, to do that I need to reverse and combine the data in the
> > first two colums so that it becomes one column with its cells holding
> > "FirstName Lastname". Any copy/pasting or merging I try overwrites the=20
> > data in the target cell rather than append to it.
> >
> > What to do?
> Something like this?
> =3DB2&" "&A2
> --=20
> Kind regards,
> Hal Ashburner

Thanks, Hal. After doing some reading, I believe I understand the
formula, and after some stumbling about was able to get it to work.

However, in my case, since I want to swap and concatenate whole
columns, I need to generate the data for each column. I tried using a
range of cells such as:

  =B2:B500&" "&A2:A500

and got nowhere. An ENTER just moves my selected cell down.

I tried to use the concatenate function:

  =CONCATENATE(A2:A4," ",B2:B4)

This concatenates the concatenation of the data in cells in column
A with the concatenation of the data of the cells of B. Interesting,
but not what I want.

It occurred to me I might have to do an array, but the manual was
sketchy on arrays. If I try on a simple little test worksheet:

  ={concatenate(B2:B4," ",A2:A4)}(3,1)[11,3]

where I try to concatenate the data in each cell of range B2:B4 with
each cell in range A2:A4, and with the result displayed in an array 3
rows tall and 1 column wide, at position at row 11, in one cell, I
get, after doing Ctl-Shft-Enter, the error: "Invalid Expression". This
probably because I have no examples of an array to work with, and the
terms used in the syntax of the array were assumed to be intuitively
obvious, which for someone like myself who has never touched a
spreadsheet, they were not. 

-- 
 
       Haines Brown
       KB1GRM