Text Functions and Functionality
Michael Rees · 2018
Excel's Text functions can be useful in many contexts, including facilitating the manipulation of numerical fields. This chapter discusses text functions and functionality and applications of them. The simplest way to join text fields is the “&” operator, selecting each text field individually. This is similar to the basic form of the CONCAT function, as well as the legacy CONCATENATE. The most general and flexible approach is to use the TEXTJOIN function. This allows for individual cells or ranges to be joined, for a delimiter to be used between joined elements, and for it to be specified whether blank cells are to be ignored or not. The VALUE function turns numerical-looking text into its corresponding value. Excel often treats such text as if it were a number anyway. The LEFT and RIGHT functions provide simple, essentially self-explanatory, methods to split off the left and right characters of a data field.