I have spent hours this afternoon in Excel 2003 trying to concatenate
two adjacent text columns into a third column defined as Text format.
It doesn't work, the result cell just displays the formula you enter
{e.g. =A1&B1 or =CONCATENATE(A1,B1)}.

I discovered after a great deal of frustration that this will only work
if the cell containing the formula is formatted as '*General'*.

All the MS command help refers to the data being concatenated as 'text'
data as does the command help that displays as you type.

I found no help on this on the MS site and trawling the web came up
with nothing either.

It seems incredible to me that a standard text operation like this will
only work in a format of 'General' which is a pretty non-descript format
anyway - 'General format cells have no specific number format' is the
helpful description you get when applying this format to cells in
Excel.

...or maybe I've missed something. Any help gratefully received.
Many thanks.


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jbenet
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