If you have multiple cells that contain text and you want to join or merge them in one cell then you can use the concatenate function.

Syntax:

CONCATENATE(text1, text2, text3 ……)

You can concatenate up to 255 items into one text string.

Example:

Cell A1 = “MBA”

Cell B1 = “Master of Business Administration”

Cell C1 contains the formula: CONCATENATE(A1; B1)

The value of C1 will be “MBAMaster of Business Administration”

You can also use literals (fixed text) in the CONCATENATE function. E.g. if C1 has the formula:

CONCATENATE(A1; “ – “; B1

Then the value of C1 will be “MBA – Master of Business Administration”

You can also use the ampersand (&) calculation operator to achieve the same result as the CONCATENATE function. The last example will look like this:

=A1 & ” – ” & B1

Suppose you have a rang of cells, say A1:A20, and you want to sum only cells A1, A4 , A6, A7and A8 which are non-adjacent. You can write a formula like this:

=A1+A4+A6+A7+A8

This is OK for a few cells but for large range, it is better to write the formula as follows:

=SUM(A1,A4,A6:A8)

Which means some A1, A4 and the range A6 to A8.

The OR function , one of many EXCEL logical functions, is used to evaluate a number of logical conditions, passed as arguments to  the function.  The function will return a single value of TRUE or FALSE.

Syntax

OR(logical1, logical2 ………)

logical1 and logical2 are conditions that evaluate to TRUE or FALSE. The first argument is required the second one is optional.

You can have up to 30 arguments in EXCEL 2003 and 255 in EXCEL 2007.

Examples:

A1 = 6

B1 = 10

=OR(A1>5;B1>10) : returns TRUE.

= OR(A1>10;B1>10):returns FALSE.

=OR(A1>5;B1>5): returns TRUE.

You can nest the OR function within another logical function as follows:

=IF(OR(A1>5;B1>10) ;”Valid numbers”;”Invalid numbers”)

If you put this formula in C1 for example, and A1 and B1 have the values shown above, then C1 will have the value : “Valid numbers”, because the OR function will evaluate to TRUE.

The AND function , one of many EXCEL logical functions, is used to evaluate a number of logical conditions, passed as arguments to  the function.  The function will return a single value of TRUE or FALSE.

Syntax

AND(logical1, logical2 ………)

logical1 and logical2 are conditions that evaluate to TRUE or FALSE. The first argument is required the second one is optional.

You can have up to 30 arguments in EXCEL 2003 and 255 in EXCEL 2007.

Examples:

Cell A1 = 6

Cell B1 = 10

Cell C1 :

=AND(A1>5;B1>10) : returns FALSE.

=AND(A1>5;B1=10): returns TRUE.

=AND(A1>5;B1>5): returns TRUE.

You can nest the AND function within another logical function as follows:

=IF(AND(A1>5;B1>10) ;”Valid Range”;”Invalid Range”)

If you put this formula in C1 for example, and A1 and B1 have the values shown above, then C1 will have the value : “Invalid Range”, because the AND function will evaluate to FALSE.