Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Texting

Well, perhaps not exactly “Texting” but in this case of our topic today, TEXT. Yes, using Text in Excel.

Obviously, Excel is all about working with numbers. However, there are times when you want to be able to manipulate your data into specially formatted Text. One excellent solution is the TEXT function! By using specially formatted stringsTEXT allows you to specify how you display the numerical value in text with format of your choosing.

The TEXT syntax is: TEXT(value, format_string) 

Let’s look at an observable example: Inserting the format_string $#,##0 as the second part of the TEXT function provides a monetary formatting with a dollar sign and comma providing immediate recognition. 

TEXT can also be used with Concatenation (which is one of my favorite somewhat-obscure functions) to return user-friendly reports. In the illustration below, the following formula (note the space after “is”) was used in the merged cells of A6 and B6:

="The Net Profit is "&TEXT(B4," $#,##0")


 The Bottom-Line Statement in the merged cells is cleanly formatted and immediately understandable to the resulting profit. This ultimately well-defined declaration of the data may not be necessary for the tech-savvy few, but I can assure you that it will be well-received by those non-techy types!

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