Excel basics for saving your time. Ampersand

This message opens a series of articles where I'll try to show which instruments and how do I use to keep my time while doing routine tasks like reports, presentations analysis, etc.

It's nothing new here if you are already an expert in all the office tools, but if not, these simple advice can help you to save up to several hours per your work week.

I extremely advice you to spend all the saved time to your health, family and education. But that's you who decide of course.

Closer to business: 
I strongly recommend you to think about using excel for simplifying your daily office tasks: from simple calculation - through analysis - to preparing reports.

I love excel very much! I began to study it it long ago at school. And I don't know how much time did it save for me. 

So Ampersand. & sign is called Ampersand in Excel. This sign helps you to join text from several cells into one text.

It is extremely helpful if you need to make a lot of similar sentences for your report or create links by known part of these links. Let me show you:

E.g. I have a table with names of employees, their working hours and I need to make a report about their attendance. Let initial table look like that:

Fig. 1 - Initial table for creating attendance report.

This time we simply add comments about attendance for each employee, without any aggregation or analytics. It's just to demonstrate how ampersand works.

So we will write a formula like this:
= First name cell & " " & Last name cell & " worked " & Attended working hours cell &
" from " & Working hours per week cell & "-hours week."

In real formula (you'll see it in figure 2) there are no gaps before and after & sign as well as cells' addresses are used.

And how you could notice, we use double quotes if we want to add some predefined text in the formula.
Here what we do, we add one more column "Comment" and put the formula there:
 =A2&" "&B2&" worked "&D2&" from "&C2&"-hours working week."

Fig. 2 - Adding comment via formula with ampersand

 Press Enter.

Now when the formula is there and works fine for the first employee, just click to the cell with formula and click two time on little square in the right bottom corner.

Fig. 3 - Click twice here to stretch the formula for the whole table.

That's it! All employees are commented with small reports on their attendance now:

Fig. 4 - Comments are ready for each employee.

Next time we'll coupe with more difficult situation and I'll show you ow I use IF-conditions to get more complicated and comprehensible comments.