Excel 2010 Bible

Chapter 11: Creating Formulas That Manipulate Text

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Most text functions are not limited to text: They can also operate with cells that contain values.

You’ll find that Excel is very accommodating when it comes to treating numbers as text and text as

numbers.

The examples discussed in this section demonstrate some common (and useful) things you can do

with text. You may need to adapt some of these examples for your own use.

Working with character codes .................................................................................

Every character you see on your screen has an associated code number. For Windows systems,

Excel uses the standard ANSI character set. The ANSI character set consists of 255 characters,

numbered (not surprisingly) from 1–255.

Figure 11.1 shows a portion of an Excel worksheet that displays all of the 255 characters. This

example uses the Wingdings 3 font. (Other fonts may have different characters.)

On the CD
The companion CD-ROM includes a copy of this workbook, which also includes some simple VBA macros that
enable you to display the character set for any font installed on your system. The file is named character
set.xlsm.

FIGURE 11.1

The ANSI character set (for the Wingdings 3 font).