Excel 2010 Bible

Chapter 11: Creating Formulas That Manipulate Text

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Determining whether two strings are identical ........................................................

You can create a simple logical formula to determine whether two cells contain the same entry. For

example, use this formula to determine whether cell A1 has the same contents as cell A2:

=A1=A2

This formula will return either TRUE or FALSE, depending on the contents of cells A1 and A2.

However, Excel is a bit lax in its comparisons when text is involved. Consider the case in which A1

contains the word January (initial capitalization), and A2 contains JANUARY (all uppercase).

If you need to insert special characters not found on your keyboard, you can use the Symbol dialog box

(choose Insert ➪ Symbols ➪ Symbol). This dialog box simplifies inserting special characters (including

Unicode characters) into cells. For example, you may want to display the Greek letter pi (π) in your

worksheet. From the Symbol dialog box, select the Symbol font (see the accompanying figure). Examine

the characters, locate the pi character, and click Insert. You’ll see (in the Character Code area of the

Symbol dialog box) that this character has a numerical code of 112.

In addition, Excel has several built-in AutoCorrect symbols. For example, if you type (c) followed by a

space or the Enter key, Excel converts it to a copyright symbol.

To see the other symbols that you can enter this way, display the AutoCorrect dialog box. To display

this dialog box, choose File ➪ Options and select the Proofing tab in the Excel Options dialog box.

Then click the AutoCorrect Options button. You can then scroll through the list to see which autocor-

rections are enabled (and delete those that you don’t want).

If you find that Excel makes an autocorrection that you don’t want, press Ctrl+Z immediately to undo

the autocorrection.

Inserting Special Characters