How to Concatenate Cells in Microsoft Access

Short Description
This tutorial demonstrates how to concatenate cells in Microsoft Access. Sometimes data distributed. over multiple columns is more efficient to use when …

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Content
How to Concatenate Cells in Microsoft Access
This tutorial demonstrates how to concatenate cells in Microsoft Access. Sometimes data distributed
over multiple columns is more efficient to use when combined into one column. For example, when
downloading Census data from the American Factfinder website, number codes used to identify geographic
entities such as state, county, and census tract may be presented in separate columns. In order to join this
table to another table or boundary file, you may need to combine the columns in the data table so that they
match the ID column in the other table or file (which would then allow you to join the two). The example
below in Figure 1 is a table called GeogTract stored within an Access geodatabase:
Notice how the state, county, and tract codes are stored in different columns. In this tutorial, we will
combine these three columns into one. Unlike Excel, which allows you to insert a new, calculated column
directly into a spreadsheet, in Access we must use the query builder to create a whole new table that will
include our calculated field. This may sound daunting, but it is actually quite easy to do. Queries are specific…