How to use TEXTJOIN
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3Combine a range of cells into one string with a separator — build lists, CSV lines, full sentences.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel | =TEXTJOIN(", ",TRUE,A2:A6) | TEXTJOIN(delimiter, ignore empty?, range). Needs Excel 2016+; the & operator is the fallback. |
| Google Sheets | =TEXTJOIN(", ",TRUE,A2:A6) | Identical. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =TEXTJOIN(", ",TRUE,A2:A6) | Identical. |
How it works
TEXTJOIN glues together a whole range with a delimiter between each value: the first argument is the separator (", "), the second says whether to skip empty cells (TRUE, so gaps don't leave doubled commas), and the third is the range — giving "apple, banana, cherry". This is what CONCATENATE and the & operator can't do easily: they'd need you to type the separator between every cell. Use CHAR(10) as the delimiter for line breaks within a cell (turn on wrap text), or combine with UNIQUE to join a de-duplicated list. TEXTJOIN needs Excel 2016+ (it's in Google Sheets and LibreOffice); on older Excel, chain values with &.
Verified, not just documented
We ran =TEXTJOIN(", ",TRUE,A2:A4) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned apple, banana, cherry — exactly the expected result. Every formula here is confirmed by actually executing it.