Text functions in Excel are some of the most useful word-processing and data-management tools you’ll find anywhere.

For example, you can use the TRIM and CLEAN functions to remove extra spaces and nonprinting characters, which is great for cleaning up imported data — a task that ranges from difficult to impossible using search and replace.

The UPPER, LOWER, and PROPER functions change the case of words, sentences, and paragraphs with no retyping. You might find yourself copying text from other documents into Excel, just so you can apply these functions. Then choose Edit, Paste Special to convert the formulas to their resulting (text) values and return the text to the original document.

In this section, we’ll discuss the most useful Excel text functions.