Microsoft Excel’s new text functions make working with strings a breeze. Image: IB Photography/Adobe Stock A common task is to parse or find characters within a delimited string in Microsoft Excel.

If you have a string, such as names, addresses, or other data entries, that you want to break into individual parts, you can use the TEXTSPLIT function to automate the process.

To learn more about Excel’s other new string functions, you can read the following articles: How to use the new TEXTAFTER () and TEXTBEFORE () functions in Microsoft Excel ...

Identify the position in the string from which you want the Search function to run. If you want Search to look at the entire string, as is most often the case, this position is "1." ...

It is a more powerful alternative to the concatenation operator (&) or the CONCATENATE function, which are two other ways of concatenating strings in Excel. TEXTJOIN function is available in Excel ...

The Trim function requires a single reference to operate. For example, entering "=TRIM (A1)" without quotes will strip all but single spaces between words from the string " this is a test " in ...

Modern Excel functions like XLOOKUP, TEXTJOIN, and dynamic arrays offer faster, more versatile, and error-resistant alternatives to outdated tools such as VLOOKUP, CONCAT, and OFFSET.