Chapter 5

Working with text functions

In this chapter, you will:

  • Get an overview of Excel’s extensive collection of text-related functions

  • Work with characters and ANSI codes

  • Manipulate strings by converting, formatting, cleaning, joining, and extracting text

  • Perform case-sensitive and case-insensitive searches for substrings within larger strings

  • Substitute one substring for another

In Excel, text is any collection of alphanumeric characters that isn’t a numeric value, a date or time value, or a formula. Words, names, and labels are all obviously text values, but so are cell values preceded by an apostrophe (‘) or formatted as text. Text values are also called strings, and I use both terms interchangeably in this chapter.

In Chapter 1

Get Microsoft Excel 2019 Formulas and Functions, First Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial