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These two were the methods we found to be the simplest and most applicable to all. Excel allows you to merge several cells into a single large cell, which can be used to center text across several rows or columns. There are plenty of other ways in Excel, like using VB script, or the TEXTJOIN function (available in newer versions and Office 365). It’s important to note though, that these are not the only two ways to do this. In this tutorial, we showed you two ways in which you can combine first and last names into a single column in Excel. So, even if you delete the original two columns containing first and last names respectively, the combined column remains unaffected. Since this method doesn’t involve a formula, it doesn’t depend on the original columns. In the same way, you can also set the pattern to have the last name followed by a comma, followed by the first name. Finally, we concatenated the value in C2 (the last name). Once we execute the function using short cut keys, it will pop up an alert message that says merging the cells will keep the Upper cell value and discard. We followed this by a dot operator and space. To merge cells in excel, first, select the cells which we want to merge together into one cell, and then we can use the short cut key starting from ALT then press the H + M + M simultaneously. Here, we specified that if cell B2 is not blank (that means if a middle name exists), we want just the first character from the cell B2. The LEFT() function takes the specified number of characters starting from the left side of the text in a cell. If you want to have the first name, followed by the middle name’s initial, followed by the last name, then your formula in D2 can be =CONCATENATE(A2,IF(B2=””,” “,” “&LEFT(B2,1)&”.”),C2).If you have a first name, last name, and a middle name in cells A2, B2, and C2 respectively, your formula in D2 can be =CONCATENATE(A2,” “,B2,” “,C2).You can replace the separating character with any character you need.So for this example, C3 would have the formula: =CONCATENATE(B2,”, “,A2) Also, replace the first cell reference with the second cell reference and vice-versa. If you want to put the last name followed by a comma, followed by the first name, then instead of a space, put a comma within quotes.