This week’s topic is text functions, Part II.
If you missed part one you can check it out here. In the first post we covered LEFT, RIGHT, and MID.
Today we are going to cover UPPER, LOWER, PROPER, and TRIM. All of these functions are extremely simple in what they do, but many people do not realize they exist. All four of these functions are one-argument functions. This means you just point the function to a string of text and let it do its work.
1. UPPER: Converts a text string to all uppercase letters.
2. LOWER: Converts a text string to all lowercase letters
3. PROPER: Converts a text string to proper case; the first letter in each word uppercase, and all other letters to lowercase.
4. TRIM: Removes all spaces from a text string except the spaces between words. This function doesn’t seem very useful, but I use it ALL THE TIME. This is because in a lot of cases when you are copying data from a non-Excel source (the Web, Word, csv file, etc) into Excel there can be leading or trailing spaces that you need to get rid of. Additionally, TRIM pairs well with a function like MID (Yes, I just made Excel functions sound like wine and cheese…you’re welcome). In the example screen shot below you can see how the unnecessary spaces are eliminated by the TRIM function.
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