Excel® 2007 Bible

Chapter 12. Creating Formulas That Manipulate Text

<feature><title>In This Chapter</title>

• How Excel handles text entered into cells

• Excel’s worksheet functions that handle text

• Examples of advanced text formulas

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Excel is, of course, best known for its ability to crunch numbers. It’s also quite versatile, however, with handling text. As you know, you can enter text for such things as row and column headings, customer names and addresses, part numbers, and just about anything else. In addition (as you may expect), you can use formulas to manipulate the text contained in cells.

This chapter contains many examples of formulas that use a variety of functions to manipulate text. Some of these formulas perform feats that you may not have thought possible.

A Few Words About Text

When you enter data into a cell, Excel immediately goes to work and determines whether you’re entering a formula, a number (including a date or time), or anything else. That “anything else” is considered text.

Note

You may hear the term string used instead of text. You can use these terms interchangeably. Sometimes they even appear together, as in text string.

How many characters in a cell?

A single cell can hold up to 32,000 characters. To put things into perspective, this chapter contains about 31,690 characters. How do I know that? I copied the entire chapter and pasted it into a single cell. Then I used the LEN function to count the characters. I certainly don’t recommend putting that much text into a cell. ...