# How do I do this in Excel?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-do-this-in-excel/447958>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [May 4, 2008, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-do-this-in-excel/447958 "2008-05-04T02:42:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![aaelghat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c5a1d2/32.png) [@aaelghat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aaelghat)\
**Post date:** [May 4, 2008, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-do-this-in-excel/447958/1 "2008-05-04T02:42:56Z")

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Hi, let’s say I have a set of words like:

1st  
2nd  
3rd  
4th  
…  
98th  
99th  
100th

and another set of words like:

meaningful  
memorable  
sentimental

and 7 more words like that.

What I want to do is create all the permutations of those words to create sentences like, “Meaningful 1st birthday”, “Memorable 2nd birthday”, etc. In the example above there are a total of 1000 permutations. I know how to concatenate sentences together from words in cells, but can I list the words above on one worksheet, and have Excel create the 1000 phrases without me having to create 1000 rows in the spreadsheet and individually piece together the sentences?

Thanks in advance.

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**Author:** ![ultrafilter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/3d9bf3/32.png) [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)\
**Post date:** [May 4, 2008, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-do-this-in-excel/447958/2 "2008-05-04T02:45:45Z")

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Know your way around VBA?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![aaelghat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c5a1d2/32.png) [@aaelghat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aaelghat)\
**Post date:** [May 4, 2008, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-do-this-in-excel/447958/3 "2008-05-04T02:49:51Z")

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[QUOTE=ultrafilter]  
Know your way around VBA?  
[/QUOTE]

Sure, I’m pretty sure I could manage if I had a starting point or a nudge in the right direction.

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**Author:** ![don\_t\_ask](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e68b1a/32.png) [@don\_t\_ask](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/don_t_ask)\
**Post date:** [May 4, 2008, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-do-this-in-excel/447958/4 "2008-05-04T03:00:27Z")

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Well you are going to end up with 1,000 rows anyway unless you are talking about just making random concatenations.

So all you need is a sheet with first second, third…listed in column A and do the ten concatenations in B to K and copy down:

=concatenate(sheet2!$A$1," “,A1,” birthday")  
=concatenate(sheet2!$B$1," “,A1,” birthday") etc