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Text function essentials

Intermediate 2 hr 11 exercises

Parse, clean, and combine text using the core text-manipulation formulas Excel users rely on every day.

What you'll learn

  • Join values from multiple cells into a single string with CONCATENATE and CONCAT
  • Clean imported text by stripping extra spaces, fixing case, and removing unwanted characters with TRIM, PROPER, and SUBSTITUTE
  • Extract fixed-length pieces of a string using LEFT, RIGHT, and MID
  • Pull out variable-length pieces — file extensions, email domains, address parts — by combining FIND with LEN
  • Layer text functions together to parse messy real-world data like names and addresses into clean columns

Functions you'll practice

Exercises in this track

0 of 11 completed 0%
1

CONCATENATE names

Beginner

Combine first name and last name columns into a full name.

2

Combine text with CONCATENATE

Beginner

Combine first and last names into full names using the CONCATENATE function.

3

Extract department code with LEFT

Beginner

Extract the 3-letter department code from the start of each SKU (e.g. FIN-1042 -> FIN).

4

Fixing text to be exact

Beginner

The EXACT function in Excel is pretty simple. It returns TRUE when the two given arguments are exactly the same. Otherwise, it returns FALSE. We've...

5

The Substitute function

Beginner

You can use the Substitute function for all kinds of textual replacing. Try changing the X in cell A2 below into a 1 by using SUBSTITUTE in cell B2....

6

Clean phone numbers

Intermediate

Standardize phone numbers by removing parentheses, dashes, and spaces.

7

Extract domain from email

Intermediate

Extract the domain name (after @) from email addresses.

8

Parse full address

Intermediate

Extract city from a full address string (assume consistent format).

9

Extract file extension from a path

Intermediate

Extract file extensions from shared-drive file paths when the number of characters after the dot changes from row to row.

10

Clean and standardize names

Advanced

Standardize company names (remove Inc/LLC/Corp, handle "The", title case).

11

Complex text parsing

Advanced

Parse inconsistently formatted addresses into separate columns (street, city, state, zip).

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