Using CONCATENATE vs & with text strings

[Mike_A]

Appsheet provides CONCATENATE to merge strings. Such as in this post by @Lynn:

CONCATENATING Dates Tips & Tricks 💡

To maintain your desired Date Formatting when concatenating dates, remember to enclose each date with TEXT() eg CONCATENATE(TEXT([DateCol1]), “and”,TEXT([DateCol2]))

Question: why use the more complicated CONCATENATE, while the & works just as well (like in JavaScript)? Is & not really supported?

[Steve]

I think & came later as a shortcut. Note that Excel (upon which AppSheet’s expression syntax and functions are (sometimes loosely) based) and other spreedsheets have both CONCATENATE() and &.