Concatenating Fields in Excel - excel

Question

I have an Excel Document that has Table Names in Column A and Column Names in Column B.
A1 B1
Account Account_ID
I can get the syntax correct.
The formula is:
=CONCATENATE("Select '",$A$1,"','",B1,"',",B1,", count(*) From ",$A$1, " group by '",",B1,";")
The output that I get is:
Select 'ACCOUNT','ACCOUNT_ID',ACCOUNT_ID, count(*) From ACCOUNT group by 'ACCOUNT','ACCOUNT_ID',ACCOUNT_ID;
The output that I need is:
Select 'ACCOUNT','ACCOUNT_ID',ACCOUNT_ID, count(*) From ACCOUNT group by ACCOUNT_ID;
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Try concatenation using the ampersand.
You can link together string literals and cell contents as such.
="String1" & "'" & "String2"
will result in
String1'String2
So to try and build sql statements from excel cells, lets say you have an excel sheet with tables and fields
A B C
1 Table1 Column1 Column2
2 Table2 COlumn1 Column2
You can build sql statements from those values
="SELECT 'Table1', " & B1 & ", " & C1 & " FROM " & A1
="SELECT 'Table2', " & B2 & ", " & C2 & " FROM " & A2
Will yield
SELECT 'Table1', Column1, Column2 FROM Table1
SELECT 'Table2', Column1, Column2 FROM Table2
The quotes specify Strings and the apersand (&) joins them together. Anything outside a set of strings will be evaluated.
For example a string with a bunch of spaces could be trimmed and joined
= TRIM(A1) & " Trimmed"
would yield
Table1 Trimmed
Your particular example would look like so
="SELECT '" & A1 & "', '" & B1 & "', Account_ID, COUNT(*) FROM " & A1 & " GROUP BY " & B1