TOCOL or not TOCOL…there really is no question. TOCOL is the easiest way to combine data from multiple lists into one!
Check out the gif above - we’ve got several employee lists broken down by department, but we want to combine all of our lists into one all-encompassing employee list to see everyone in the company at once. Rather than copying and pasting each list manually (🫠🤯), we can use the TOCOL function. Let’s take a look at TOCOL’s three arguments to understand how to work with it:
- Array Argument: this is the range of data that we’re transforming into one column
- Ignore Argument: this determines whether we’d like to ignore blank cells or errors in our array
- Scan_by_Column Argument: this determines whether we’d like to scan our array by columns or rows
To begin combining our lists using TOCOL, we’ll first select the cell where we want our new master list to start and enter the TOCOL function. Next we’ll select all of the employees that we want to combine as the array argument - be sure to exclude the header values, since we don’t need departments names appearing in our employee list. Then we’ll set our ignore argument equal to 1 so that our function ignores any blank cells when combining, and finally, simply enter the function to instantly generate a full list of all employees from each department!
