Microsoft Office

Creating Formulas That
Manipulate Text
Excel is, of course, best known for its ability to crunch numbers. It’s also
quite versatile, however, with handling text. As you know, you can enter
text for such things as row and column headings, customer names and
addresses, part numbers, and just about anything else. In addition (as you may
expect), you can use formulas to manipulate the text contained in cells.
This chapter contains many examples of formulas that use a variety of functions
to manipulate text. Some of these formulas perform feats that you may not have
thought possible.
A Few Words About Text
When you enter data into a cell, Excel immediately goes to work and determines
whether you’re entering a formula, a number (including a date or time), or anything
else. That “anything else” is considered text.
You may hear the term string used instead of text. You can use
NOTE
these terms interchangeably. Sometimes they even appear
together, as in text string.
IN THIS CHAPTER
How Excel handles text entered
into cells
Excel’s worksheet functions that
handle text
Examples of advanced text
formulas
How many characters in a cell?
A single cell can hold up to 32,000 characters. To put things into perspective,
this chapter contains about 31,690 characters. How do I know that? I copied the
entire chapter and pasted it into a single cell. Then I used the LEN function to
count the characters. I certainly don’t recommend putting that much text into a
cell. Performance is extremely sluggish, and it’s very likely that Excel will crash.
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