Combining Two or More Fields into a Single Field- Concatenations Explained (DB)

'Concatenation' is a simple concept. It means to link things together.

For example, if you have a first name Louis and a last name Armstrong and you concatenate them, you get Louis Armstrong. Actually this particular concatenation has a third element - the space between the first and last names.

Claris products use the ampersand (&) to concatenate fields and/or text. Notice in the examples below that text (as opposed to numbers, field names, dates or functions, etc.) are surrounded by quotation marks ("). To get the space between the first and last names, we concatenate them with a space enclosed in quotation marks.

Given that you have fields First Name and Last Name, here are formulas that will concatenate them for you. [for clarity, the caret (^) has been used to show where you should type a space]

FileMaker
Full Name (calculation, text result) = First Name & "^" & Last Name
This means, 'link together the entry in the First Name field, a space, and the entry in the Last Name field.'

ClarisWorks
Full Name (calculation, text result) = 'First Name' & "^" & 'Last Name'

(Notice that in ClarisWorks, the field names are surrounded by apostrophes)

In ClarisWorks, there is also a concatenation function built in. The following formula produces the same results as the above two:

Full Name (calculation, text result) = Concat('First Name',"^",'Last Name')
This means, 'link together the following items: the entry in the First Name field, a space, and the entry in the Last Name field.'

To go to the next line in FileMaker add & "¦" to the concatenation where you want the line to break. However, in ClarisWorks, using either method above, you cannot place a carriage return within the concatenation. In addition, ClarisWorks calculation fields do not word wrap to a second line. They will only use one line one line, so any calculation result which continues beyond the width of the field will be cropped.