Concatenate two text strings into one state

I was attempting to get past the limits of putting non-unique values into the same list by concatenating the current cell’s index with the current cell’s text of a repeating group. Unfortunately, I don’t think it is possible? I can add two numbers but I can’t figure how to combine two strings.

You’re wanting to save this combo in a data type’s field? You can’t because the cell index is a number and the text is a text. They need to be the same type to be saved together in a field of 1 type.

I’m assuming there’s no direct way to convert the index to text either. I did find a workaround which is not ideal. I used an input to concatenate the index and text and then referenced the input’s value in the workflow.