From the course: Excel Tips Weekly

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 24,400 courses taught by industry experts.

Clean up and adjust data with the SUBSTITUTE and REPLACE functions

Clean up and adjust data with the SUBSTITUTE and REPLACE functions - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel Tips Weekly

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Clean up and adjust data with the SUBSTITUTE and REPLACE functions

“

- [Instructor] Excel has quite a few different text functions. Two of them, replace and substitute are very similar in nature and yet there's a basic difference. The replace function is based on the idea that you want to replace characters based on their position, not their content; the substitute function is based on content. Let's first look at an example column A here, replace fifth character with X. And these three examples here and you can imagine these being a part of a huge list. We want that fifth character, regardless of what it happens to B, to be replaced with the character X. So in that first entry there in cell A3, the fifth character reading from left to right is a dash, and the next cell below it, the fifth character from left to right is the number eight. So in both cases and in also in the third one too, we want to replace that character with an X. So the replace function begins initially with, we…

Contents