Entering phone numbers

When you enter phone numbers in a cell, you must enter them as text which means that you should add an apostrophe before entering the number. In this case, it is best to enter the number in international format. If you don’t want to think about codes and calling numbers, you can retrieve this data from the auxiliary records, and then join them with the help of the TEXTJOIN function. You will find out how to enter email addresses and phone numbers in the following text.

Consolidated list of products

Imagine this scenario: you register customers in an Excel spreadsheet, specifying their ID and then the products they use. Which customer uses which products? One way to get this answer is to create a pivot table, and then display customers, products and the number of products. The disadvantage of this report is that pivot tables always aggregate data. What if we only need a table with customer ID in one column and a consolidated list of products in another?

Text splitting

The TEXTJOIN function is one of the newer ones, until Office 2019 exclusively available to Microsoft 365 subscribers, and it allows joining multiple strings into one by specifying them and then defining delimiters and the option to ignore those that are empty. Since august, the TEXTSPLIT function appeared, and its purpose is to split strings. How to use this function you will find out in the “recipe” that follows…

Don’t stay without text

When someone tells you, “I’m left without text” this usually means a state of shock and confusion. Ignoring text related functions will not leave you in shock, but you will certainly be deprived of some useful tools. These functions are numerous, and in the “recipe” that follows I’ll describe these that allow merging of two or more texts into one, converting text to number or number in text, determining the length of text …