Text Functions

Excel provides a wide range of worksheet functions that operate on text. You are already familiar with the operator, to concatenate text or text and values. Most of Excel s text functions select or modify one or more characters within a text string. 

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This appendix describes the components used in the synthesized netlists shown in the text. Functionality of each component is specified using comments. 

The following worksheet functions operate on the date serial value to return a date or time YEAR(value), MONTH(va/ue) and DAY value). Value canhe a serial value, a cell reference or a date as text. MONTH returns a number between 1 and 12, DAY a number between 1 and 31. The text function TEXT can also be used to format a date serial value any custom date format can be applied (see "The FIXED and TEXT Functions" later in this chapter). 

Figure 3-16. A list of names reformatted using text functions.

MegaForm.xls illustrates the use of "megaformulas" (in this case involving text functions). Unhide columns C through F to view the separate parts of the megaformula. 

When this is done, the range text function is implicitly called whenever necessary. So, the following SQL would produce the same table as shown above. 

To change only a selected range of values to "precision as displayed", use the FIXED worksheet function (see "Text Functions" in Chapter 3). 

Nevertheless, advantages in some instances can lead to disadvantages in other instances. Live Mathcad equations using many-storied operators, instead of text functions, cause difficulties in Mathcad Application Server technology. 

In general, you can define text that includes non-ASCII characters like symbols and Greek letters using the text function, assigning the character sequence to the String property of text objects. You can also include these character sequences in the string arguments of the title, xlabel, ylabel, and zlabel functions. 

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