6 Essential TEXT functions in Excel with 6 Everyday Examples
Excel text functions are essential for cleaning up data, extracting parts or combining results. Learn the most important functions and their usage in this article.
Make a random sentence with Excel formulas
Ever wanted to make a random sentence or text? You can use Excel formulas to make totally random sentences. This is a great way to generate test data or dummy data-sets.
#awesome trick – Extract word by position using FILTERXML()
This is CRAZY!!!. I stumbled on a weird use for FILTERXML() while reading a forum post earlier today. So I couldn’t wait to test it. I am happy to share the results.
Say you have some text (sentence / phrase / keyword etc.) in a cell and you want to extract the nth word. Unfortunately Excel doesn’t have SPLIT() formula. So we end up writing obscenely long array formulas or use gazillion helper columns.
Here is the super sneaky trick. Use FILTERXML() instead.
A trick to Pivot text values
We all know that Pivot Tables are best thing since avocado on toast. But they can’t slice text values and spread them in a table with Pivots. So how to take a large blob of text and turn it in to something meaningful like above?
Simple, we use Power Query.
Untrimmable Spaces – Excel Formula
Let’s talk about the untrimmable spaces.
We all know that TRIM() removes extra spaces from the beginning, ending and middle of a text.
So for example, if A1 has ” something and one more ”
TRIM(A1)
will give “something and one more”
We can use CLEAN() function to remove non-printable characters (like the ASCII codes 0 to 31). Of course, SPACE is technically a printable character, so CLEAN() won’t remove spaces.
The untrimmable spaces…?
The other day Sreekanth emailed me a sample of data and asked, “how do I remove the spaces in this list and convert them to numbers?”
Naturally I tried to TRIM().
But the data won’t budge. See above.
Hmm, let’s investigate why.
PSA: Don’t let auto correct spoil your party
So here is a news from strange but true department. Microsoft Excel blamed for gene study errors [bbc.com].
Microsoft’s Excel has been blamed for errors in academic papers on genomics.
Researchers trying to raise awareness of the issue claim that the spreadsheet software automatically converts the names of certain genes into dates.
Gene symbols like SEPT2 (Septin 2) were found to be altered to “September 2”.
Aah, classic!
This is what happens when you spend countless hours learning genome sequencing and very little about the software tools where your data goes. May be we need clippy back to warn people about such sticky situations.
Find out how many times a value is present in a cell [formulas]
Here is an interesting problem to start your day.
Let’s say you work as DNA sequencing engineer at The Enterprise. And you just unlocked the sequence that is responsible for all male problems. The early onset of baldness. The sequence code is AAAA. And you want to find out how many times this sequence is found in a sample of DNA strings, in the range B6:B19. Essentially you want the above.
So how do you write the formula?