[excel] Concatenating date with a string in Excel

I have two cells in Excel. one has a string and the other one has a date. in the third cell I want to put the date and the string together. For example:

A1 = "This "
A2 = "03/03/1982"

I want A3 to be:

This 03/03/1982

when I try to put this in the A3 formula: = A1 & A2 it returns some funny numerical value for the date and does not give me the literal date.

Another approach

=CONCATENATE("Age as of ", TEXT(TODAY(),"dd-mmm-yyyy"))

This will return Age as of 06-Aug-2013

This is the numerical representation of the date. The thing you get when referring to dates from formulas like that.

You'll have to do:

= A1 & TEXT(A2, "mm/dd/yyyy")

The biggest problem here is that the format specifier is locale-dependent. It will not work/produce not what expected if the file is opened with a differently localized Excel.

Now, you could have a user-defined function:

public function AsDisplayed(byval c as range) as string
  AsDisplayed = c.Text
end function

and then

= A1 & AsDisplayed(A2)

But then there's a bug (feature?) in Excel because of which the .Text property is suddenly not available during certain stages of the computation cycle, and your formulas display #VALUE instead of what they should.

That is, it's bad either way.

Thanks for the solution !

It works, but in a french Excel environment, you should apply something like

TEXTE(F2;"jj/mm/aaaa")

to get the date preserved as it is displayed in F2 cell, after concatenation. Best Regards

You can do it this simple way :

A1 = Mahi
A2 = NULL(blank)

Select A2 Right click on cell --> Format cells --> change to TEXT

Then put the date in A2 (A2 =31/07/1990)

Then concatenate it will work. No need of any formulae.

=CONCATENATE(A1,A2)

mahi31/07/1990

(This works on the empty cells ie.,Before entering the DATE value to cell you need to make it as TEXT).