Excel® 2010 Workbook for Dummies®

Chapter 14. Text Formulas and Functions

In This Chapter

• Understanding how to construct text in formulas

• Creating formulas that combine text entries stored in different cells

• Changing the case of text entries using the Text functions

At first, thinking about text formulas and functions in spreadsheets may seem strange, accustomed as we all are to thinking of spreadsheets as number crunchers. Nevertheless, not only can you construct formulas that use text as operands with the special concatenation or linking operator, but you can also build formulas using any number of Text functions that require text exclusively in their arguments.

In this chapter, you get a chance to practice building text formulas that link together separate text cell entries whose text should be entered together in the same cell. You also get a chance to use Text functions to convert text entries to the proper upper- and lowercase letters.

Constructing Text Formulas

Simple text formulas (that is, those that don't rely on any Text functions) merely join pieces of text together using the & (ampersand) operator. It's the so-called concatenation operator. (Concatenation means to join or string together in a series.) Here are a couple of caveats to keep in mind about text formulas:

• The text operands must be enclosed in sets of quotation marks.

• Spaces must be included in the operands (and within the quotes) if you don't want the text to glom together as a single illegible clump of letters.

For example, if you want to create ...