Convert a Column or Rows of Data into Comma Separated Values

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CSV. This is the acronym for comma separated values or Cash Surrender Value (if you are selling insurance). But this is not an insurance blog so I'll stick with the former definition. If you work with data, sometimes you get it in one format and you've got to put it into another format to get more data. In this case you get a list of values in a column and you'd need to take that list and input it into some program to get more data. But the input there is one input field and it takes the list in a CSV format. Basically all those separate values together, but separated by commas. This task is not so bad if you've got a few values like this:
1

2

3

Then you'd just need to convert this to the CSV format of 1,2,3.

But what if you had a hundred values? or maybe a thousand values? Doing this manually would just suck all the time from your life. Well here's Excel to the rescue. You can actually do this quite easily. So check out the video to see how.

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Closed Caption:

hi the session I'm going to show you how
to convert a column lists of data or
just a bunch of rows of data into a list
of comma separated values basically turn
this column data into this so we have
our list of values separated by commas
now they don't have to be separated by
commas you can have them separated by
semicolons or pipes or whatever you want
to separate them out but basically why
would we want to do this is sometimes we
may have a columnist and we want to have
more separated by commas because we want
to put it into copy and paste this all
into another application and maybe that
other application now maybe we're
running a query and it only has one
field for us to enter data that it's
separated by commas
so if we have a hundred or thousands of
rows of this data we don't want to go
one by one and copy it into another cell
to create our list of values
so what we want to do is make have it
have a nice and easy way quick way to do
this so let me go ahead and just delete
this and I'm going to show you how to do
it
so the first thing we need to do is
basically bring in this value here so
you just do equal sign
select a to press ENTER and we just
basically copied over in the next cell
want to do is use the concatenation
function support equal sign
conc that kind of gives us the last
selection which is concatenate i just
press tab to complete that now our first
text here is going to be the cell a3 and
we'll put a comma to separate it in the
next text the next value your input
we're going to put in there is the , and
we need to put the comma in between
quotes so it's going to be open quote ,
and then close quote and then here you
know we like i mentioned before if you
don't have need to have a , could be a
semicolon or any other character you
want to put
now the third text value with a comma
here
the third text value is going to be the
cell above so sucks out above our shift
and close shift the close parenthesis
and press enter now I'm I've got my two
values here basically this value and the
one above
let me go back into the cell b3 and I
want to see this flute will see this
little and oh just go ahead and double
click that and it's going to copy the
formula down
so basically what I did was went to copy
the formula down it copied this cell and
what are the values are in that cell
and so it just repeats that down all the
way down until you get to the bottom and
now we have this whole column lists now
this is on roe
but if we select this role we can see
that it it's still the formula in most
cases you probably just copy it as is
ctrl c and copied into your other
application where you want to paste this
if it doesn't let you what you can do is
also just copy that
i think i just press ctrl c and select
another cell and do a paste values not
formulas but values and if we look in
the cell when be one or two we can see
that it did copy all the values for us
so this is the hopefully quick and easy
way for you to take a columnist or role
of data and put together a list of comma
separated values or CSV list of csv
values will hope that helps
thanks for watching