Excel 2000 in a Nutshell

Chapter 18. Text Functions

Excel provides a series of functions to use to convert and manipulate text values for use in your worksheet. The functions provide the ability to perform tasks such as changing the case of the letters in a text string, or replacing specific characters in the string.

The following functions are covered in detail in this chapter:

CHAR	LEFT	SEARCH
CLEAN	LEN	SUBSTITUTE
CODE	LOWER	T
CONCATENATE	MID	TEXT
DOLLAR	PROPER	TRIM
EXACT	REPLACE	UPPER
FIND	REPT	VALUE
FIXED	RIGHT

Use these functions to do the following:

• Remove unprintable characters from text

• Find the character code for the first character in a string of text

• Join multiple text strings together

• Compare strings to determine if they are the same

• Determine the location of text within a string

• Find the length of a string

• Replace text within a string

The Text Functions

Excel provides several different functions that are used to work with the text values within a worksheet. These functions are covered in the remaining portion of this chapter in alphabetical order, but they can be categorized as follows:

Work with text:

CHAR (get the character value)

CLEAN (remove unprintable characters)

CONCATENATE (join several text strings)

EXACT (determine if two strings are the same)

FIND (locate one string within another)

LEFT (return the specified number of characters from the left side of a string)

LEN (determine the length of a string)

LOWER (convert all letters to lowercase)

MID (return the specified number ...