Frequently, you will have data that, instead of being numerical, is text based. The data could be names of people, businesses, or longer form text you would like to mine for information. While Excel is primarily designed to deal with and manipulate numbers, it also has a set of tools that help you work with text information efficiently and easily. This tutorial is designed to familiarize you with those tools in a common and easy to understand situation.

The data has been collected in the Microsoft Excel Online file below. Open the spreadsheet and perform the required analysis to answer the questions below.

Open spreadsheet

Common Text Functions

Functions such as PROPER, LEN, LEFT, and RIGHT allow you to clean up and parse text information that may arrive to you in a less than ideal format. Practice using these functions in cells D$2$:D$5$ using the data in column C$.$

Name data to proper case: fill in the blank $2$

Number of characters in a text string: fill in the blank $3$

Find first $4$ characters of a text string: fill in the blank $4$

Find final $3$ characters of a text string: fill in the blank $5$

While LEFT and RIGHT are straightforward, the MID function will provide the middle portion of a text string. You just need to tell it where to begin and how many characters you want after that location.

Get three characters from a text string starting on the third character: fill in the blank $6$

Concatenation