MS Excel: textual functions

The VALUETOTEXT function in Excel is designed to convert any value—number, text, logical, or array—into a text string. Introduced in Excel 365, it’s especially useful for debugging, auditing formulas, or displaying underlying data clearly in dynamic reports or dashboards.

The VALUE function in Excel converts text representations of numbers into actual numeric values. This function is especially helpful when numbers are stored as text and you need to perform mathematical operations on them—like sums, averages, or comparisons.

The UPPER function in Excel is used to convert any text string into uppercase letters. It is especially useful when you need to standardize text formats across your data—such as customer names, product codes, or locations—so that everything appears in a consistent, capitalized style.

The UNICODE function in Excel returns the numeric Unicode code point of the first character in a text string. It’s the counterpart of the UNICHAR function, which does the reverse (i.e., returns a character based on a Unicode number).

The UNICHAR function in Excel returns the Unicode character referenced by a given numeric code point. It is the modern equivalent of the CHAR function, but unlike CHAR, which is limited to ANSI (ASCII) characters (0–255), UNICHAR supports the full range of Unicode characters.

The TRIM function in Excel is used to remove all extra spaces from a text string, leaving only single spaces between words. This is especially useful when cleaning up imported or manually entered data that may contain: Irregular spacing Leading or trailing spaces Multiple spaces between words

The TEXTJOIN function is one of Excel’s modern text functions introduced in Excel 2016. It allows you to combine (join) multiple text strings using a specified delimiter, such as a comma, space, dash, or line break. It's especially powerful because it lets you ignore blank cells, making it cleaner and more efficient than older methods like CONCATENATE or &.

The TEXT function in Excel allows you to convert numbers, dates, and times into formatted text. It’s essential when you want to display numeric values in a specific format—like currency, percentages, or custom date formats—while retaining flexibility in combining data with other strings.

The T function in Excel is a text-handling function used to return the text portion of a value. If the input value is text, T returns that text. If the value is not text (like a number, date, or boolean), it returns an empty string ("").

The SUBSTITUTE function in Excel is used to replace existing text with new text in a string, allowing you to target specific occurrences of a substring. Unlike REPLACE, which works based on position, SUBSTITUTE identifies exact text to change—making it ideal for cleaning and restructuring textual data.

The SEARCH function in Excel is used to find the position (as a number) of one text string within another. Unlike the FIND function, SEARCH is not case-sensitive and supports the use of wildcards, making it more flexible for general text searches.

The REPT function in Excel is used to repeat a text string a specified number of times. This can be particularly useful for data visualization, creating in-cell bar charts, or generating repeated patterns or placeholders in your spreadsheet

The REPLACE function in Excel is used to substitute a portion of a text string with new text, based on a specific position and number of characters. It is especially useful when you need to correct formatting, update values, or modify identifiers (e.g., phone numbers, codes, or part numbers) within a cell.

The PROPER function in Excel is designed to capitalize the first letter of each word in a text string while converting all other letters to lowercase. It’s often used to standardize names, titles, addresses, or any other textual data that needs to follow title case formatting.

The NUMBERVALUE function in Excel is used to convert text representations of numbers into actual numeric values, especially when the text uses non-standard decimal or thousands separators. This is extremely helpful when working with data imported from CSV files, foreign locales, or web scraping, where formatting may vary.

The LOWER function in Excel is used to convert all uppercase letters in a text string to lowercase. It’s especially useful for standardizing text data, cleaning up user input, or preparing da

The LET function in Excel allows you to assign names to calculation results or expressions and reuse them within a formula. It enhances performance, readability, and maintainability by avoiding repetition of the same expression.

The LEN function in Excel is used to calculate the number of characters in a given text string, including letters, numbers, symbols, and spaces. It's a simple yet powerful tool used in text analysis, data validation, and cleaning operations.

The FIXED function in Excel is used to round and format a number as text, with a fixed number of decimal places and optional commas for thousands separators. It’s often used in reporting or exporting financial or statistical data where you want consistent, readable formatting—but don’t want the result treated as a number.

The FIND function in Excel is used to locate the position of a substring (a piece of text) within another string. It returns the position number of the first character where the substring is found. The function is case-sensitive and does not allow wildcards, making it ideal for precise string matching.