iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Transforming Text in Formulas

Numbers has a mind for math, sure, but it’s also got a talent for juggling words and rearranging letters. The program’s many text functions let you work with your cells’ text entries to clean up your data, combine prose into new constructions, or pluck a snippet of text from the middle of a longer passage.

The way you’ll most commonly work with your text values is to combine them into entirely new values. In the same way that you add numbers with the + operator, you combine text with the & operator, which glues two bits of text together. In Numbers, text snippets are called strings and combining them is called something only a geek could love: concatenation. It works just like addition, only with strings instead of numbers. This formula, for example, concatenates a first name and last name into a full name, putting a space in between for good measure:

="Walter" & " " & "Kovacs"

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Totally Random

How do I generate random numbers?

When you need a quick collection of random numbers for your spreadsheet, turn to the RAND and RANDBETWEEN functions, which pluck numbers from thin air. You might put the resulting numbers to use to build a pop quiz for your math students, or to sort a table in random order, for example.

RAND takes no arguments and gives you a random number between 0 and 1 (but never equal to either). For example, this formula returns results like 0.3682823833:

=RAND( )

More often, though, you’ll want a number within some range ...