You want a full mailing address in one cell. You have street, unit, city, state, and zip in five columns. Half your rows have no unit number.
The join works. Then every apartment-free address reads "123 Main St, , Austin, TX". That empty comma is the whole problem.
The Old Way (&, CONCATENATE, TEXTJOIN)
The simplest join is the ampersand. It is fine for two clean cells.
=A2 & " " & B2TEXTJOIN is smarter because it can skip blanks with its second argument. So people reach for it.
=TEXTJOIN(", ", TRUE, A2:E2)That TRUE flag drops empty cells, which fixes the double comma. But it applies one delimiter to everything. A real address is not one delimiter. You want a space between street and unit, then a comma before the city, then a space before the zip.
To get mixed formatting you go back to hand-built nesting, and the blank-skipping logic comes back too.
=A2 & IF(B2<>"", " " & B2, "") & ", " & C2 & ", " & D2 & " " & E2One IF per optional field. Add a country and you edit the formula again. This is a lot of typing for "put these together nicely".
The FITS Way (Describe the Result)
With FITS, you describe the finished string once. Blank fields and spacing sort themselves out.
=FITS("Combine into one mailing address, skip any blank fields: " & A2 & " | " & B2 & " | " & C2 & " | " & D2 & " | " & E2)Making a full name from first and last is the same idea, and it handles the row where the middle name is missing.
=FITS("Build a full name from these parts, drop blanks: " & A2 & " " & B2 & " " & C2)No IF branches, no second-guessing the delimiter. You state the shape of the output and every row follows it.
When to Use Each
Use the ampersand or TEXTJOIN when the cells are clean and the format is one flat delimiter. Reach for =FITS() when fields go blank, when the spacing changes between fields, or when you want a readable sentence instead of a joined string. Splitting is the mirror image of this job, covered in how to separate first and last names. If the parts themselves are messy first, tidy them with our normalize data guide. Combining is one of the jobs that used to need a pattern, and the rest are in automating Google Sheets tasks you used to need regex for.
Stop Nesting IF Statements to Join Cells
FITS puts plain-English AI formulas inside Google Sheets. Describe the output. Get clean joined text with no empty gaps. Free tier included.