Excel's Formula - sisman

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Part II: Using Functions in Your Formulas
Removing excess spaces and nonprinting characters
Often data imported into an Excel worksheet contains excess spaces or strange (often unprintable)
characters. Excel provides you with two functions to help whip your data into shape: TRIM
and CLEAN:
TRIM removes all leading and trailing spaces, and it replaces internal strings of multiple
spaces by a single space.
CLEAN removes all nonprinting characters from a string. These “garbage” characters
often appear when you import certain types of data.
This example uses the TRIM function. The formula returns Fourth Quarter Earnings (with no
excess spaces):
=TRIM(“ Fourth Quarter Earnings “)
Counting characters in a string
The Excel LEN function takes one argument and returns the number of characters in the argument.
For example, assume that cell A1 contains the string September Sales. The following formula
returns 15:
=LEN(A1)
Notice that space characters are included in the character count. This can be useful for identifying
strings with extraneous spaces — which can cause problems in some situations, such as in
lookup formulas. The following formula returns FALSE if cell A1 contains any leading spaces, trailing
spaces, or multiple spaces.
=LEN(A1)=LEN(TRIM(A1))
The following formula shortens text that is too long. If the text in A1 is more than ten characters
in length, this formula returns the first nine characters plus an ellipsis (133 on the ANSI chart) as a
continuation character. If it’s ten or fewer, the whole string is returned:
=IF(LEN(A1)>10,LEFT(A1,9)&CHAR(133),A1)
Later in this chapter you’ll see example formulas that demonstrate how to count the
number of a specific character within a string (see the “Advanced Text Formulas” section).
Also, Chapter 7 contains additional counting techniques. Still more counting
examples are provided in Chapter 15, which deals with array formulas.