173

I have the task of creating a simple Excel sheet that takes an unspecified number of rows in Column A like this:

1234
123461
123151
11321

And make them into a comma-separated list in another cell that the user can easily copy and paste into another program like so:

1234,123461,123151,11321

What is the easiest way to do this?

4
  • 8
    Part of the solution might be Edit, Paste Special, Transpose to convert the column into a row. If the other program accepts Tabs rather than commas, then you're all set after copying the new row.
    – Arjan
    Feb 3, 2011 at 12:00
  • How do you do the opposite of this? Take a comma-separated list and convert it to a column of content?
    – stevvve
    Oct 22, 2014 at 17:10
  • 1
    @stevvve use Text to Columns feature in the data tab. support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/214261
    – Trevor
    Sep 24, 2015 at 17:42
  • 1
    I use any regular expression capable text editor for this, like notepad++. Copy column values and paste it in the editor, search and replace regular expression, find "\r\n" replace with ",". If you want to convert CSV to column, find "," and replace with "\r\n"
    – junaling
    Jul 20, 2017 at 20:27

14 Answers 14

169

Assuming your data starts in A1 I would put the following in column B:

B1:

=A1

B2:

=B1&","&A2

You can then paste column B2 down the whole column. The last cell in column B should now be a comma separated list of column A.

2
  • 10
    This is great for a limited number of rows, but (depending on available memory?) the process will cut short if you're concatenating beyond a couple thousand rows, leaving your output value incomplete. Be careful. Sep 18, 2014 at 21:47
  • Using Excel 2013 on a powerful Windows 10 Pro computer, this failed after only 30-35 lines. I needed well over 200. Solution by Michael Joseph worked perfectly.
    – Trialsman
    Jun 5, 2019 at 19:30
106
  • Copy the column in Excel
  • Open Word
  • "Paste special" as text only
  • Select the data in Word (the one that you need to convert to text separated with ,), press Ctrl-H (Find & replace)
  • In "Find what" box type ^p
  • In "Replace with" box type ,
  • Select "Replace all"
4
  • +1 Same as "official" solution here by Microsoft: support.microsoft.com/kb/819964
    – Neo
    Dec 30, 2013 at 15:51
  • 1
    very cute solution... :-)
    – Saravanan
    Feb 11, 2014 at 6:35
  • 1
    As a last step -> Remove the , after the last number. :-)
    – Gautham M
    May 30, 2021 at 15:33
  • Even after more than a decade, this is still the only reasonable working solution in converting multiple values to a single text value when working with a local Excel file.
    – Codingwiz
    May 16, 2023 at 14:24
93

If you have Office 365 Excel then you can use TEXTJOIN():

=TEXTJOIN(",",TRUE,A:A)

enter image description here

7
  • 3
    As Scott points out, important caveat is Excel 365 only. Function does not exist in Excel 2016.
    – WhyGeeEx
    Sep 30, 2020 at 20:07
  • 2
    If you need a quote separated list 'a','b','c', try ="'" & TEXTJOIN("','",TRUE,A:A) & "'"
    – Stevoisiak
    Oct 28, 2020 at 19:31
  • The most elegant solution! Mar 2, 2022 at 11:22
  • ✅ Accepted answer. If you have an input array: =REDUCE(,F7:F10, LAMBDA(a,b,CONCAT(a,", ",b))) Apr 6, 2023 at 10:46
  • 1
    Nice answer, unless you have a big list. I think it's limited by the max characters a cell can contain: 32,767 characters
    – cs_pupil
    May 9, 2023 at 18:50
26

I actually just created a module in VBA which does all of the work. It takes my ranged list and creates a comma-delimited string which is output into the cell of my choice:

Function csvRange(myRange As Range)
    Dim csvRangeOutput
    Dim entry as variant
    For Each entry In myRange
        If Not IsEmpty(entry.Value) Then
            csvRangeOutput = csvRangeOutput & entry.Value & ","
        End If
    Next
    csvRange = Left(csvRangeOutput, Len(csvRangeOutput) - 1)
End Function

So then in my cell, I just put =csvRange(A:A) and it gives me the comma-delimited list.

2
  • 2
    Ah.. pretty close to my answer, but I like your implementation.
    – mpeterson
    Feb 3, 2011 at 14:27
  • I like it. You may just want to check to see if Len(csvRangeOutput) is 0 before returning csvRange. If 0, you'll have a run time error.
    – WhyGeeEx
    Sep 30, 2020 at 20:42
12

An alternative approach would be to paste the Excel column into this in-browser tool:

convert.town/column-to-comma-separated-list

It converts a column of text to a comma separated list.

As the user is copying and pasting to another program anyway, this may be just as easy for them.

7

Use vi, or vim to simply place a comma at the end of each line:

%s/$/,/

To explain this command:

  • % means do the action (i.e., find and replace) to all lines
  • s indicates substitution
  • / separates the arguments (i.e., s/find/replace/options)
  • $ represents the end of a line
  • , is the replacement text in this case
2
  • Disagree with comments because of context. Someone with a superuser account who posts here is often the type to use vim.
    – uniquegeek
    Mar 1, 2016 at 20:25
  • I but use ViM and think the basic idea is useful. I ended up solving the problem by using the idea and a simple text editor.
    – Nigini
    Dec 16, 2016 at 17:16
7

You could do something like this. If you aren't talking about a huge spreadsheet this would perform 'ok'...

  • Alt-F11, Create a macro to create the list (see code below)
  • Assign it to shortcut or toolbar button
  • User pastes their column of numbers into column A, presses the button, and their list goes into cell B1.

Here is the VBA macro code:

Sub generatecsv() 

Dim i As Integer
Dim s As String

i = 1

Do Until Cells(i, 1).Value = ""
    If (s = "") Then
        s = Cells(i, 1).Value
    Else
        s = s & "," & Cells(i, 1).Value
    End If
    i = i + 1 
Loop
    
Cells(1, 2).Value = s

End Sub

Be sure to set the format of cell B1 to 'text' or you'll get a messed up number. I'm sure you can do this in VBA as well but I'm not sure how at the moment, and need to get back to work. ;)

0
2

You could use How-To Geek's guide on turning a row into a column and simply reverse it. Then export the data as a csv (comma-deliminated format), and you have your plaintext comma-seperated list! You can copy from notepad and put it back into excel if you want. Also, if the you want a space after the comma, you could do a search & replace feature, replacing "," with ", ". Hope that helps!

1
  • Exporting to CSV is beyond what this user can do. I need it to be point and click within excel. Feb 2, 2011 at 16:15
2

muncherelli, I liked your answer, and I tweaked it :). Just a minor thing, there are times I pull data from a sheet and use it to query a database. I added an optional "textQualify" parameter that helps create a comma seperated list usable in a query.

Function csvRange(myRange As Range, Optional textQualify As String)
    'e.g. csvRange(A:A)  or csvRange(A1:A2,"'") etc in a cell to hold the string
    Dim csvRangeOutput
    For Each entry In myRange
        If Not IsEmpty(entry.Value) Then
            csvRangeOutput = csvRangeOutput & textQualify & entry.Value & textQualify & ","
        End If
    Next
    csvRange = Left(csvRangeOutput, Len(csvRangeOutput) - 1)
End Function
1

Sux2Lose's answer is my preferred method, but it doesn't work if you're dealing with more than a couple thousand rows, and may break for even fewer rows if your computer doesn't have much available memory.

Best practice in this case is probably to copy the column, create a new workbook, past special in A1 of the new workbook and Transpose so that the column is now a row. Then save the workbook as a .csv. Your csv is now basically a plain-text comma separated list that you can open in a text editor.

Note: Remember to transpose the column into a row before saving as csv. Otherwise Excel won't know to stick commas between the values.

1

I improved the generatecsv() sub to handle an excel sheet that contains multiple lists with blank lines separating both the titles of each list and the lists from their titles. example

list title 1

item 1
item 2

list title 2

item 1
item 2

and combines them of course into multiple rows, 1 per list.

reason, I had a client send me multiple keywords in list format for their website based on subject matter, needed a way to get these keywords into the webpages easily. So modified the routine and came up with the following, also I changed the variable names to meaningful names:

Sub generatecsv()

  Dim dataRow As Integer
  Dim listRow As Integer
  Dim data As String

  dataRow = 1: Rem the row that it is being read from column A otherwise known as 1 in vb script
  listRow = 1: Rem the row in column B that is getting written

  Do Until Cells(dataRow, 1).Value = "" And Cells(dataRow + 1, 1).Value = ""
    If (data = "") Then
      data = Cells(dataRow, 1).Value
    Else
      If Cells(dataRow, 1).Value <> "" Then
        data = data & "," & Cells(dataRow, 1).Value
      Else
        Cells(listRow, 2).Value = data
        data = ""
        listRow = listRow + 1
      End If
    End If
    dataRow = dataRow + 1
  Loop

  Cells(listRow, 2).Value = data

End Sub
0

I did it this way

Removed all the unwanted columns and data, then saved as .csv file, then replaced the extra commas and new line using Visual Studio Code editor. Hola

-1

One of the easiest ways is to use zamazin.co web app for these kind of comma separating tasks. Just fill in the column data and hit the convert button to make a comma separated list. You can even use some other settings to improve the desired output.

http://zamazin.co/comma-separator-tool

enter image description here

1
-3

Use =CONCATENATE(A1;",";A2;",";A3;",";A4;",";A5) on the cell that you want to display the result.

1
  • 5
    This is an unscalable manual solution. Apr 7, 2016 at 9:49

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .