"msdelila" wrote:
I have an excel spreadsheet consisting of columns of
"patient ID's" and then various columns of "numerical values".

Why should we care about what is in the other columns?

I ask because if that is significant, I am misunderstanding something.


"msdelila" wrote:
Some patient ID's are "DD-0002-0001PK" as an example.
I Want to add a "L" to some of those sample names....like
"DD-0002-001PK-L" how can I do that?

=A1&"-L"

However, that presumes that A1 (patient IDs) are indeed text.

If some of them are entered as numbers formatted to appear in the form
00-0000-00000, A1 will not be interpreted as intended above. In that case,
you might need something like:

=IF(ISNUMBER(A1),TEXT(A1,"00-0000-00000"),A1) & "-L"


"msdelila" wrote:
I can't just put ="L"&A1, because my values are text and
if I do that it just changes it to a 0

Say what? Nonsense!

You cannot do ="L"&A1 because the puts "L" in front, but your example
demonstrates that you want to __append__ "-L" (after the end).

Moreover, ="L"&A1 will never return the number 0 or even the string "0".

One way (the only way I can think of, off-hand) that a cell with that
formula might __display__ "0" is if you have the pretty-silly Custom format
;;;"0" or the equivalent.


"msdelila" wrote:
I need those ID labels, but I don't want to have to go
back manually and type in "L". Is there anyway that I
can put "L" on the back of the first 40 ID's?

Again, your example indicates that you want to append "-L", not simply "L".

If the first 40 IDs are in A1:A40, put =A1&"-L" into B1 and copy down
through B40.

(Or use the IF(ISNUMBER...) alternative, if needed.)

If you want to replace A1:A40 with the values in B1:B40, copy B1:B40, then
use paste-special-value to paste over A1:A40. Now you can remove B1:B40.

If you need to repeat this operation many times over time (e.g. pulling data
from a database), we could provide a macro to make this change. But do you
really want to deal with VBA?