For freelancers in administrative roles such as executive assistants or project managers, your work often involves data entry into spreadsheets and creating reports using tools like Excel and Google Sheets. Understanding key Excel functions that manipulate data can dramatically improve your efficiency and speed. Beyond basic mathematical operations, text functions are particularly valuable tools that can save you significant time and effort by automating tasks that would otherwise require tedious manual editing. Let's explore some of the most practical Excel text functions that make data manipulation a breeze! CONCATENATE: Joining Text Strings One of my favorite functions is CONCATENATE , which joins two or more text strings into one. Syntax: =CONCATENATE(A2, " ", B2) In this formula: A2 represents the column with the first string The double quotation marks with a space (" ") add a space between strings B2 represents the column with the second string ...