What is text in Excel

To illustrate how Excel classifies data, I’ll enter some data in column B.

As long as you haven’t overridden Excel’s default alignment, you’ll see numbers are right-aligned automatically.

Text will be left-aligned by default.

Dates and times are right-aligned like numbers.

In fact, Excel handles dates and times as numbers.

We’ll look at this in detail in another video.

So, 2 + 2 returns 4, which is a number.

In fact, if we concatenate any number with another number, we’ll get text.

you’re able to also explicitly set content as text by adding a single quote before the value.

Finally, boolean values are a special data jot down for TRUE and FALSE values.

ISTEXT takes a single argumentthe value you are testingand returns TRUE or FALSE.

To make these examples easier to read, I can add aconditional formatting rulethat highlights the TEXT examples.