Convert a column into a comma separated list (2025)

173

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.

• 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.

  –samthebrand

  Commented 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

  Commented Jun 5, 2019 at 19:30

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112

• 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"

• +1 Same as "official" solution here by Microsoft: support.microsoft.com/kb/819964

  –Neo

  Commented Dec 30, 2013 at 15:51

• 1

  very cute solution... :-)

  –Saravanan

  Commented Feb 11, 2014 at 6:35

• 1

  As a last step -> Remove the , after the last number. :-)

  –Gautham M

  Commented 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

  Commented May 16, 2023 at 14:24

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101

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

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

• 3

  As Scott points out, important caveat is Excel 365 only. Function does not exist in Excel 2016.

  –WhyGeeEx

  Commented Sep 30, 2020 at 20:07

• 2

  If you need a quote separated list 'a','b','c', try ="'" & TEXTJOIN("','",TRUE,A:A) & "'"

  See Also

  excel ignores system list separator

  –Stevoisiak

  Commented Oct 28, 2020 at 19:31

• The most elegant solution!

  –Paul-Sebastian Manole

  Commented Mar 2, 2022 at 11:22

• ✅ Accepted answer. If you have an input array: =REDUCE(,F7:F10, LAMBDA(a,b,CONCAT(a,", ",b)))

  –Renato Heeb

  Commented 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

  Commented May 9, 2023 at 18:50

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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

  Ah.. pretty close to my answer, but I like your implementation.

  –mpeterson

  Commented 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

  Commented Sep 30, 2020 at 20:42

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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.

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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

• Disagree with comments because of context. Someone with a superuser account who posts here is often the type to use vim.

  –uniquegeek

  Commented 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

  Commented Dec 16, 2016 at 17:16

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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 IntegerDim s As Stringi = 1Do 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 = sEnd 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. ;)

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2

• Exporting to CSV is beyond what this user can do. I need it to be point and click within excel.

  –muncherelli

  Commented Feb 2, 2011 at 16:15

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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

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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.

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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 1item 1item 2list title 2item 1item 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 = dataEnd Sub

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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

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-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

• This is now at delim.co

  –Phil

  Commented Dec 10, 2018 at 19:53

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-3

• 5

  This is an unscalable manual solution.

  –Daniel Hári

  Commented Apr 7, 2016 at 9:49

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