Excel Workbook For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14

Text Formulas and Functions

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding how to construct text in formulas

Creating formulas that combine text entries stored in different cells

Changing the case of text entries using the Text functions

At first, thinking about text formulas and functions in spreadsheets may seem strange, accustomed as we all are to thinking of spreadsheets as number crunchers. Nevertheless, not only can you construct formulas that use text as operands with the special concatenation or linking operator, but you can also build formulas using a number of functions in Excel's Text category that require text exclusively in their arguments.

In this chapter, you practice building text formulas that link together separate text cell entries whose text should be entered together in the same cell. You also use text functions to convert text entries to the proper upper- and lowercase letters.

Constructing Text Formulas

Basic text formulas (that is, those that don’t rely on any text functions) merely join pieces of text — often called strings — together using the & (ampersand) operator. It’s the so-called concatenation operator. (In Excel, concatenation means to join one or more strings.) ...