In Excel, you will occasionally deal with text fields containing line breaks, multiple spaces, hyphenation, currency and letterlike symbols, etc. This is common when dealing with unrestricted user-inputted data and can cause issues. In particular, these kinds of values will be hard to connect with related values without cleanup. When we MATCH those values with related data tables, errors are bound to occur. Basic cleanup approaches include manual replacement of all of the unnecessary characters with a desired or …
Tag: MID function
How to MATCH numbers formatted as text in Excel
You will sometimes encounter issues while trying to MATCH or LOOKUP data in Excel if your numbers are formatted as numbers in one of your tables and as text in another table. While special formats are available in Excel, they are relatively rarely used and are limited. Some “numbers”, such as identification numbers, are more often stored as text. This is done in order to add leading zeros, hyphens, and other characters to those numbers. However, if we try to …
Text in Excel
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, …