TextJoin - An Excel 2016 Text Function

If you need to join a lot of text together in a string, check out TEXTJOIN.

It is a text function that was introduced in Excel 2016 to join text in cells together.
Initially, you might think that the function is not worth investigating. After all, we already have the ampersand (& ) as well as the CONCATENATE function to join text together.
However, TEXTJOIN has a decided advantage if you need to join multiple cells together because it only requires you to specify the delimiter once.
The syntax is =TEXTJOIN(delimiter, ignore empty, text…)

Let me give you a simple example using a person’s first, middle and last name and their professional designation.

If we used CONCATENATE, the equation would be : =CONCATENATE(A2,” “,B2,” “,C2,” “,D2). With TEXTJOIN the equation is  =TEXTJOIN(” “,,A2:D2).

and this result would display: 

Lisa Marie Brown CPA

Clearly, TEXTJOIN is a bit simpler and a bit more elegant if you have a lot of cells that you want to join together and you want to use the same delimiter throughout.

Different Delimiters
You can use different delimiters if you wish and it is still simpler than CONCATENATE as well.
In this example, I wanted spaces after each of the names but I wanted a comma before the professional designation so I used =TEXTJOIN(” “,,A2,B2,C2,”,”,D2) and Excel displayed  the following result.

Lisa Marie Brown , CPA

So, add TEXTJOIN to your arsenal of text functions if you have Excel 2016.

Excel 2016 Charts - X Axis Date Units

Date Units on the X Axis- Excel

I was working on a dashboard in Excel 2016 and I ran into something a bit frustrating. So, I thought I would share it since I am assuming others have run into the problem as well.
Below is a picture of my data and my chart - See anything wrong with it?
OK- now don't get too picky - this is before I formatted or updated anything - so what's wrong with it?

Take a look at my X axis..
The X axis shows 1/1/2016, 2/1/2016 instead of what is actually shown in Column A, which is the last day of each month.  I have used this same data and charted it in other versions and never ran into this particular issue so I was a  bit surprised.
Apparently Excel 2016 and probably Excel 2013's unit default is month.
To fix this problem, right-click on the X axis and on the Format Axis pane, change the Base to Days.

Once you do that, magically the dates in my chart now match the dates in my worksheet.