Any excel experts on here? This will surely qualify for most boring thread of the day

[Ihateexcel23]

Hope, hope, hope the answer is yes and you can share your excel knowledge. I am new in my role and struggling but came up with an idea the team liked so feel I have a chance to prove myself. The idea uses conditional formatting to answer questions and then join the answers to make a file name. I can answer the questions but can't join all the answers. Please can anyone help, I am quickly deciding I hate excel! Or is there another way to do this ?

I don't know the answer but whenever I have an Excel question there's usually a YouTube video out there to answer it, if it can be done. Have you tried looking OK YouTube?

I know there is a concatenation function that will put together a whole series of words found in separate cells. I would assume you would then need a separate function that could take that output and turn it into a file name

There are loads of Excel fans on here.

Unsure entirely what is needed here but "concatenate" function joins strings together (or using "&").

May need some more detail for a complete solution.

You could do it via VBA which is a macro you can create in excel. As PP says, there are lots of excel specific forums that would help with your query. What exactly are you picturing it doing?

I think you should be able to use CONCAT function which concatenated a list pr range of strings

*excuse typos I'm on a phone

If you want the file to just suggest the file name you can use concat to propose it.

E.g =CONCAT(A1&A2&A3) just joins whatever is in those cells together
Or =CONCAT(A1&" "&A2&"_"&A3) will join A1 then a space, then A2 then an underscore then A3

If you want the file to take cells and autosave with a file name then that requires vba.

Oh thanks everyone, can't believe there arecso many answers. Sorry should have mentioned that I tried youtube but couldn't find the answer.

If I am understanding this right....I use conditional formating to answer the questions and then concatenate the answers. I wish I had a brain that u derstood excel logic, I'm more a words than maths brain.

So sorry for all the typos and spaces. No idea what happened there. Thank you, it's MN at its best 👏

How are you going to answer questions using conditional formating?
Or do you mean to have conditional formatting based on the response people give? e.g. "yes" would turn green and "no" would turn red?
If you want standardised responses then you'll need to put the options in a drop down list, otherwise one person will respond with Y and another with Yes.

Hi Coronation Station....yes the conditional formating will select an output based on an answer to a question. I haven't set it up yet but that's the theory as my peri menopausal brain is trying to work out how for each question.

I'm still a bit confused as to what you're trying to do but I think what you mean is data validation rather than conditional formatting? Do you want people to be able to pick their response from a list of options?

Get your company to sort out some training for you. These guys https://www.frog.co.uk/ do good online Excel training. No, I don't work there, but I've done a couple of their courses and found them really helpful and friendly.

I'm also confused about the conditional formatting bit - what is it that is done automatically? If they answer 'yes' or 'apple' what does the formatting do? Is it that it turns things different colours and then you want all the e.g. green cells to string together into a file name?

@Ihateexcel23 could you post a screenshot of what you have so far in Excel that uses conditional formatting in relation to answering questions. It's much easier for people to help if you have an actual example to work from.

Do you mean data validation rather than conditional formatting?

Create a column in another sheet with an IF statement picking out answers or several columns if multiple answers as a start maybe?

CONCAT will work for combining cell values. I think you're looking for IF statements to create variable dependant cell values/answers though? I'm not sure what conditional formatting can do? CONCAT won't read formatting.

If you take a screenshot of your worksheet it might help. You can also upload workbooks to reddit or stack for answers from superpros.

So many replies, thanks so much. I have worked thro it and am using data validation and concatenation and yes I really need training

Whilst it would work, there's no need to use both CONCATENATE and & together.

=CONCATENATE(A1,A2,A3)

or

=A1&A2&A3

should be enough.