Often, our data comes to us in ways that are better for calculating than they are for reading. One example of this is a standard data table that repeats headers and labels for each row. When we are sorting, alphabetizing, and filtering, this format is incredibly useful. However, when we want to read a summary of the information, these tables are difficult to work with. Sometimes, it is better to have all the options in a table listed in a comma-separated list rather than broken out across many rows. Unfortunately, Excel doesn’t have a simple function to make this possible. Here is a quick set of data manipulation steps that will build a comma-separated list in a single cell from multiple rows of data…

Examine the Data and the Objective

Let’s look at an example data set… In this case, we have a list of all the Makes and Models of cars available in the U.S. for 2014. They are stored in a table with a separate row for each model, so the make of the car is repeated in each row as well.

What we want is a single row for each make of vehicle with a list of models after it, separated by commas. It should look like this:

The steps that follow will show you how to get to this result.