Text-related features Excel may have a reputation for crunching numbers, but text-formatted data such as names, addresses, and descriptions is often encountered. Excel is also often used for processing data from a wide variety of unrelated databases, applications, and web sites. With those, issues such as numbers formatted as text, text formatted as numbers, multiple text fields combined into a single cell, and broken tables are not uncommon. Further complicating things, Excel functions designed to manipulate text-formatted data are many, …
Spreadsheet basics
Starting with spreadsheets Spreadsheets are used to store and manipulate data. That data is stored in cells and organized in tables (i.e., rows and columns). Table cells can contain a value (text or number) or a formula. Formulas calculate new values, usually by referencing existing values. Both values and formulas can be easily modified. These simple concepts can then be used to perform basic tasks, i.e., you can use your spreadsheet as a tape calculator. On the other hand, …