Excel 365: Use Text Functions

Course description

This course explores a suite of text functions available in Excel 365 that support formatting, analyzing, and transforming text-based data. It begins with LEFT, RIGHT, and MID, which allow for extracting characters from specific positions within a text string. Examples show how to isolate components such as IDs or part numbers by referencing character positions. The course then covers UPPER, LOWER, and PROPER, which adjust capitalization in data to ensure uniformity. These functions are particularly useful for names, locations, or imported data with inconsistent formatting. The LEN function is also introduced as a way to count the number of characters in a text string, aiding in validation or further conditional formatting. Next, the TRIM function is demonstrated to clean up excess spaces in text, an issue often found in data imported from other systems. The SUBSTITUTE function provides a formula-based method to replace parts of text with new values, allowing for more control than standard find-and-replace methods. The session also illustrates how these functions can be combined to solve more complex formatting challenges, such as transforming uppercase names into proper case while also merging them into a single formatted string. A practical example shows how to generate structured email addresses using a combination of LEFT, PROPER, and text concatenation methods. Altogether, the course demonstrates how Excel’s text functions can be used to clean, reformat, and restructure textual data for clearer presentation and improved usability within spreadsheets.

Course outline