Excel Beginners

Data Types and Formatting: Step 2 To Mastering Spreadsheets

What You see is what you get

Text Values

What Is A Text Value?

A text value is any set of characters which does not allow itself to be manipulated by mathematic equations or formulas. Where there is confusion is sometimes text values can in fact look to be numbers, dates, or times. This is primarily due to poor formatting, but can also be because the values were forced into this format by users with specific intentions behind this decision.

How Do Text Values Work?

Text values are often referred to as strings, which is shorthand for a string of characters. Where this comes into play is that strings of characters can be added, removed, or replaced, very easily. When you look at the word “hello”, you see one word made up of five letters. Excel sees this as five characters appended to one another. Even the phrase “good morning” is only considered to be twelve characters in a specific order.

Every letter, number, symbol, space, and character are associated to a number value which the system uses to identify it. This means that even numbers can be used in a text value. An example of this would be if the following sentence would be inserted into a cell in Excel: “You owe me $5”. While a number is present, because the entire sentence is in one cell and the number is linked to the rest of the text, it is still considered to be a text string.

What Are Text Values Used For?

These values are primarily used as descriptors for other information. Headers and tags for information, chart titles, or summaries of results. It is not uncommon for qualitative data to come in the form of text values as well. These can be treated manually for analysis, paired with numerical values for descriptive statistics, or run through tools such as Power Query which can handle text values as inputs more reliably than a basic Pivot Table.

With the inclusion of text based functions, it is even possible to generate entire messages, updates, or follow-up requests through an Excel file which will return a customised message from a series of inputs and predefined response outputs.