Text in a spreadsheet is not very useful unless you can do something with it. Fortunately, Numbers provides several functions for working with text.

Here is a quick look at some of the most useful text functions:

CONCATENATE(string1, string2, [string3,…])

Joins strings. Note: You can also use & (Ampersand) to join strings.

Usage:

LEFT(text, [length])

Retrieves the specified number of characters from the left end of a string.

MID(text, start, length)

Extracts characters from a string starting at a specified position.

RIGHT(text, [length])

Retrieves the specified number of characters from the right end of a string.

Usage:

There are many other text related functions which you can reference in the Numbers documentation.

Keep exploring!

I found an interesting technique a while back on the Juice Analytics site, that works well in Numbers.

The technique uses the REPT Function, to create neat in-cell graphs.

The Numbers manual defines REPT as:

REPT(text, copies)

• text: The text expression to be repeated.
• copies: The number of times text is repeated.

For example: REPT(“x”,10) gives you “xxxxxxxxxx”.

Let’s look at a “real world” example. I want to show quick graphic of Major League Baseball home run leaders through 8/28/2007. I grabbed the stats off the web, then created three columns. The first column was player name, the second was number of home runs year to date, and the third was reserved for my formula. I pasted in my players, and home run numbers, then input my formula.

The formula was, REPT(“[apple symbol]“, number of home runs)

There are a number of symbols that look good in the in-cell charts, the lowercase “o” or “|” for instance.

Another idea, if the number of items you are charting is large, is to only repeat a percentage of the text. For instance:

REPT(text,(copies*.5))

This will reduce the number of repeated text items by half.

You can download an example sheet below.

Download Incell Graph Template for Numbers

Note: This post should hold true for both Numbers, and Excel, as the functions are identical.

The DATEDIF function finds the number of days, months, or years between two dates.

The format is DATEDIF(start-date, end-date, method)
- start-date and end-date are self explanatory
- method has several options:
“D” – counts the days between the dates.
“M” – counts the months between the dates.
“Y” – counts the years between the dates.
“MD” – counts the days between the dates as if they were in the same year
“YM” – counts the months between the dates as if they were in the same year
“YD” – counts the months between the dates as if they were in the same month and year

OK, let’s put it all together for a real-word example. We are going to create a function that calculates a users current age from their birthday. Before we go through the example, I need to introduce two addition functions: 1) NOW(), returns today’s date. 2) Concatenate, joins two or more strings of text. You can use “&” as a shortcut for this function.

First, open a new sheet, and enter the word “Birthday:” in cell A1 of your table, in cell B2 enter “Your Age:”
Next, format cell B1 as a date, and enter your date of birth in the cell.
Finally, we will enter our formula in cell B2. Type the following:

=DATEDIF(B1,NOW),”Y”)&” Years,”& DATEDIF(B1,NOW(),”YM”)&” Months, “& DATEDIF(B1,NOW(),”MD”)& ” Days”

Now you should see something like the screenshot below.

Let’s take a closer look at our formula. It contains three DATEDIF functions, concatenated together with some text. All of the functions use the entered birthdate, B1, as the start-date, and the NOW() function is used as end-date. The first instance uses the “Y” method to determine the number of years elapsed since the birthdate, the second function uses the “YM” method to determine the number of months elapsed since the birthdate. The third function use the “MD” method to determine the number of days since the birthdate.

That’s the DATEDIF function in a nutshell.

For practice, you may consider altering the formula to create a sheet that determines how old you will be on a future date.