Chapter 16
Writing Home about Text Functions
In This Chapter
Assembling, altering, and formatting text
Figuring out the length of text
Comparing text
Searching for text
A rose is still a rose by any other name. Or maybe not, when you use Excel’s sophisticated text-manipulation functions to change it into something else. Case in point: You can use the REPLACE function to change a rose into a tulip or a daisy, literally!
Did you ever have to work on a list where people’s full names are in one column but you need to use only their last names? You could extract the last names to another column manually, but that strategy gets pretty tedious for more than a few names. What if the list contains hundreds of names? This is just one example of text manipulations that you can easily and quickly do with Excel’s text functions.
Breaking Apart Text
Excel has three functions that are used to extract part of a text value (often referred to as a string). The LEFT, RIGHT, and MID functions let you get to the parts of a text value that their name implies, extracting part of a text value from the ...
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