 One of the neat tricks you can do in a spreadsheet like Google Sheets is you can use formulas not only to look at numbers or even to select text, but to start combining text with calculations, which is sort of like doing a form fill on a letter. But it gives you a lot more control and flexibility. I want to show you a few different ways of combining information. They all accomplish the same thing, but they give you different approaches to it. And depending on how many items you're using, you might want to choose one or the other. I use all of these in my own work. Let's go back to this fictional example of, say, for instance, a yoga studio. And you've got seven days here, and you're keeping track of attendance in the group yoga classes. You've got 31 on Monday, 26 on Tuesday, things drop off by Thursday, you're down to seven, then people feel bad and they start showing up there on the weekend. And so you have 134 people total showing up in those seven days. But let's find out how you can use some special functions in Google Sheets to combine that into a report. So I'm going to come over here for a moment, and I'm going to paste in a little bit of information. First, let's put in the beginning of a sentence you had a total of, and then we're going to put a formula here. Now this formula is simply referring to this data over here, it's just the sum is the same formulas down here. Okay, so we've got that. But now let's put the second part of a sentence, I'm going to turn off the formula display here for a moment. You had a total of 134 visitors this week. And so what this is is some text, a number that's derived from a formula, and then a little more text, we want to put them all together into a single sentence. Now we've got a few ways to do this. The first one is with this. Now, here's, you see, there's a problem with this one, by the way. What I've done is I've simply said use this cell and this cell and this cell. So you use the and sign the ampersand to get from one to the other. That's great, except as you can tell, it doesn't put spaces in. And so you need to add the spaces manually. And the way you do that is by inserting two more parts here. You put in quotes with a space. And so it says, take this first cell, add a space, add the second cell, add a space, add the third cell. And so that works. And that can be a useful way of combining the information and making sure it's formatted the way you want to. It looks like a proper sentence. And it's not clear to people that you're actually doing some math to make these things happen. Another way to do it is to actually include the formula in there itself. Because in this one, I'm using the sum that comes from up here. This one, I'm including a formula that refers back to the original column. So there may be times when you want to do the calculations in your sentence, or you simply want to refer to the calculations that are done elsewhere. Obviously, the result is identical. Another option is to use the sentences right there in the cell itself. So let me highlight this one. This time I'm typing, you had a total of, and I'm including the space in there. Then I put the ampersand, then I put the formula sum. And then ampersand the and sign and then quote, and I include the space here and then visitors this week. And so the only thing that's going on here is I'm inserting that sum that makes it possible to get the rest of the information. And then there are two other ways that we can do this. There's a special function called join. And when you use join, what it does is it lets you specify the cells you want to put together and the thing you want to stick in between each cell. In this case, I'm putting quotes with a space and then comment and say join this one and this one and this one. I could also use D2 colon F2 to specify the range. But it's a really quick and easy way. Sometimes when you have a lot of things to put together, the join statement is going to be easier, although I find the and statement where you're using the and sign can be a little clearer about what's going on. And then finally, one other option is to use join. But to this time, have the formula for the sum right in here. So it's a self contained statement. So it's referring to this one, join it with that, join it with that. Anyhow, you can use ampersand, the and sign, as long as you remember to put a space in by putting quote, space, quote, or you can use join either one allows you to combine text, along with calculations based on the information. I use this a lot in spreadsheets as a way of creating a sort of mail merge. I use it to create the subject lines for emails to have boilerplate text for emails. And so I just have to copy one, paste it into the subject copy a second, paste it into the text. And I'm good to go and it's based on a whole series of calculations combining text that's in my spreadsheet. So it gives you extra flexibility and extra power to work with different kinds of data to get it to best fit with your particular needs.