Merging Rows across Columns in Microsoft Excel

Every once in awhile I have to modify spreadsheets to get the job done. There's always one thing that has been a manual process that I never figured out. The problem is, "if I have elements in two columns that I want to merge into one column, how do I do that across all rows in the columns?". Normally if two columns are chosen for a merge, all elements are put into one cell. I want each row to merge cells individually. Additionally, there is a "merge across" function but this removes the contents of the second cell. This blog provided the answer. http://ooo-forums.apache.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=26042 The key is to use the following syntax in a third cell to copy the contents of the first two cells into the third cell. =A1&" "&B1 If you want to delete A1 and B1, you can copy the entire contents of the sheet to a new sheet and paste as "Values". This remove the linkages from the formula.