Using a Concatenate Calculation to Combine the Values in Two Columns

The Calculations Tab in your Templates is a very useful tab that can allow you to manipulate your sales files' data in a variety of ways. One of these calculations is Concatenate, which can be used to combine the characters in different columns into a new column or field.  

As an example, let's say that your sales file does not include a column for ISRC. We can use a Concatenate calculation to combine the Track Title with the Track Artist, then assign that as the ISRC. Upon ingestion of our sales file, using the Mapping Manager, we can add the concatenated value as an Alias to the track.

In your sales Template, go to the Calculation Tab and click the +Calculation button to add a new calculation. In the Conditions section, we select the conditions under which this calculation will be applied. For instance, if there is no column for ISRC whatsoever, we would want this calculation to apply "Always". If we only want this calculation to apply during certain circumstances, we can select "Any One of the Below", or "All of the Below". For example, if our sales file has an ISRC column, but some of those cells are blank, we can specify that the calculation only applies when this column indeed is blank.

Once we've established the conditions under which our calculation should apply, we can specify which columns we want to concatenate and in which field we'd like to store this result. In the below example, we take both values stored in Column 5 and Column 6, and store this in the ISRC field.

After we have saved our sales template, we can ingest our sales file and the calculation will be applied. A concatenate calculation may be helpful in a variety of situations. In our example, our newly created values stored in the ISRC field will be flagged as unknown by our Mapping Manager, after which we can arrange for these sales to continuously be mapped to the correct Track in our catalogue.