Greetings,
Using Excel 2003

Can the combine the contents of two columns into one column? Contents of,
say, columns C and D would become Column C with the cell contents 'merged'
into that column (So C-1 and D-1 info would now appear, together, in C-1)?

Here's what I'm trying to do:

I have a list of figures from a word-processing program that need to be
sorted. We currently enter the list into an Excel column that's been
formatted as Text because our figure numbers are 'section-figure' so it's
things like A-1, A-2.... B-17, B-18... L-5, L-6, etc.

The difficulty is, formatted as text or not, when we sort the alphanumerics,
A-10 will come before A-2, and a 12-entry list looks like this:

A-1
A-10
A-11
A-12
A-2
A-3 (etc up to A-9)

We got the idea of using one column for the 'section-' so we can put the
numbers in their own column. We can either format it as numbers or, when
sorting, be prompted to treat them as numbers. No biggie. Unfortunately,
now we have to copy those columns to paste into a word-processing program
(Paste Special Text, even), which means there's what appears to be a large
Tab between the section number (A-) and the number (1). Now we have:
A- 1
A- 2
etc.

So I checked "Help" and found I can 'combine' cell contents (=A1&A2), and
that seems to be a great way to do it... if I want to highlight every cell,
or copy the formula and do a column-wide paste, then delete the original two
columns.

If we have to, we'll use the 'combine' function and delete the extra
columns, it's really not that difficult.

On the other hand, if there's a way to apply it to the entire columns so
that we shrink down by one, well that would be just peachy.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Shane