Ms Office Tune Up

You can set up a simple logical formula to determine whether two cells contain the same entry. For example, use this formula to determine whether cell A1 has the same contents as cell A2:

=A1=A2

Excel acts a bit lax in its comparisons when text is involved. Consider the case in which A1 contains the word January (initial capitalization), and A2 contains JANUARY (all uppercase). You’ll find that the previous formula returns TRUE even though the contents of the two cells are not really the same. In other words, the comparison is not case sensitive.

In many cases, you don’t need to worry about the case of the text. However, if you need to make an exact, case-sensitive comparison, you can use Excel’s EXACT function. The formula that follows returns TRUE only if cells A1 and A2 contain exactly the same entry:

=EXACT(A1,A2)

The following formula returns FALSE because the first string contains a trailing space:

=EXACT("zero ","zero")

Joining Two or More Cells

Excel uses an ampersand as its concatenation operator. Concatenation is simply a fancy term that describes what happens when you join the contents of two or more cells. For example, if cell A1 contains the text Tucson and cell A2 contains the text Arizona, the following formula will return TucsonArizona:

=A1&A2

Notice that the two strings are joined together without an intervening space. To add a space between the two entries (to get Tucson Arizona), use a formula like this one:

=A1&" "&A2

Or, even better, use a comma and a space to produce Tucson, Arizona:

=A1&", "&A2

Another option is to eliminate the quote characters and use the CHAR function, with an appropriate argument. Note this example of using the CHAR function to represent a comma (44) and a space (32):

=A1&CHAR(44)&CHAR(32)&A2

If you’d like to force a line break between strings, concatenate the strings by using CHAR(10), which inserts a line break character. Also, make sure that you apply the wrap text format to the cell (choose Home Alignment Wrap Text). The following example joins the text in cell A1 and the text in cell B1, with a line break in between:

=A1&CHAR(10)&B1

Here’s another example of the CHAR function. The following formula returns the string Stop by concatenating four characters returned by the CHAR function:

=CHAR(83)&CHAR(116)&CHAR(111)&CHAR(112)

Here’s a final example of using the & operator. In this case, the formula combines text with the result of an expression that returns the maximum value in column C:

="The largest value in Column C is " &MAX(C:C)

Popularity: 3% [?]