Excel's Formula - sisman

Chapter 20: Creating Megaformulas 563
This technique involves arrays, so you might want to review the material in Part IV to
familiarize yourself with this topic.
This example describes how to create a megaformula that returns the character position of the
last space character in a string. You can, of course, modify the formula to work with any other
character.
Creating the intermediate formulas
The general plan is to create an array of characters in the string but in reverse order. After that
array is created, you can use the MATCH function to locate the first space character in the array.
Refer to Figure 20-4, which shows the results of the intermediate formulas. Cell A1 contains an
arbitrary name, which happens to use 12 characters. The range B1:B12 contains the following array
formula:
{=ROW(INDIRECT(“1:”&LEN(A1)))}
Figure 20-4: These intermediate formulas will eventually be converted to a single megaformula.
This example, named position of last space.xlsx, is available on the companion
CD-ROM.
You enter this multicell array formula into the entire B1:B12 range by selecting the range, typing
the formula, and pressing Ctrl+Shift+Enter. Don’t type the curly brackets. Excel adds the curly
brackets to indicate an array formula. This formula returns an array of 12 consecutive integers.
The range C1:C12 contains the following array formula:
{=LEN(A1)+1–B1:B12}