Most people are probably familiar with how to find and replace text in the average word processor. The basic principles are the same in spreadsheets, but there’s four main additional things to consider: target, scope, direction, and precision.

A lot of times people need to email a whole bunch of people, like, for example, an entire department, and not everyone has access to a convenient mass mailer. So you need to get all the email addresses into the… Read moreProject: Mass emails

The other day someone asked me if there was an easy way to figure out how many of each of a set of things to purchase, to have the least amount of money left over. In this particular case, there… Read moreProject: Calculating best money use

Now that I’ve talked about how to keep references from being relative, and the sort of tricks that allows you to do, I’m going to talk about a fun little trick that relative formulas let you do quickly and easily:… Read moreIncremental formulas

A few weeks ago, when I was talking about switching the locations of two sets of cells, I mentioned the importance of using cut instead of copy, because unless you specified otherwise references in spreadsheets are relative.

miIf you go into the “Date & Time” category in the function selection menu of any spreadsheet program you’ll find a lot of options, but there’s only a few I use on a regular basis. These functions are consistent over… Read moreFunctions for dates and times

Now that I’ve discussed the text functions len() and find(), it’s time to get back to how to convert numerical text to numbers. Example 1: Stripping characters off the ends (e.g. $ and %). If you have a piece of… Read moreChanging variable-format text to numbers

When I discussed the updated formulas for extracting two ISBNs in a single column to two other columns, I mentioned that if they weren’t in order and you ended up with the ISBN-13 in the ISBN-10 column, it was easy… Read moreSwitching chunks of cells

Sometimes you only care about a certain part of a string of text. For example, when reading a letter from a potential employer the first thing you care about is whether it says to schedule an interview, or to submit… Read moreText function: finding sub-text

Note: I planning to follow up last week’s post about the len() function by discussing another text function: find(). Things happened, however, including a friend in the hospital, so I’ll put that off until next week. Instead I’m going to… Read moreProject: Finding files