Thank you. This was more than informative. For anyone looking in the future, my issue was caused by hidden rows. This is a working sheet with hundreds of rows and we only sort the ones that are currently being worked on. When I added the two columns and selected the format as "general" or "text" somehow it was not formatting row one. Once I expanded and showed all rows I was able to see that row 1 was still formatted as "date". Once that was changed to general all merged as it should.