Text in Excel

[Island Girl]

Is there ever a good reason for putting mostly all text into Excel rather
than a Word table? At my level of knowledge, I certainly can't imagine what
advantage there would be.

However, upon request, I recently placed over 20 pages into Excel, only one
column of which contained ID numbers while the other 7 columns contained
paragraphs of text, which was--for me, at least--a formatting nightmare.

Do you have any words of wisdom that I can relate to my superiors that might
in some way help them to see that Word would have been a much better choice?

Or am I wrong? Could there possibly be a reason?

 

[Shane Devenshire]

Hi,

Many reasons:

1. Excel's sort options are better
2. Excel has Filter options
3. You can use many functions against text in Excel such as
COUNTIF(A1:A100,"Alaska") would count the number of occurances of the text
Alaska in the range.
4. You can create frequency charts and Excel's charting tool is superior to
Word's in 2003 or earlier.
5. You can use the SUBTOTAL command, Word doesn't have one.
6. There are a myrid of function is Excel which are not in Word and these
functions may handle text or not in many cases. =TRIM(A1), FIND, LEFT,
RIGHT, ....

 

[T. Valko]

If you won't need to manipulate this data or perform any calculations on the
numbers then by all means use Word.

 

[Island Girl]

Thanks, Shane, for helping me see reasons why Excel might have been the right
choice.

 

[Island Girl]

Thanks, T, for your helpful advice. Some manipulation became necessary and
everything turned out okay.

 

[T. Valko]

You're welcome!

--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP

Thanks, T, for your helpful advice. Some manipulation became necessary
and
everything turned out okay.

 

[JLatham]

I'll also add this to what Shane and TValko have said: IMHO you're far
better off in the long run to be in error and enter text into Excel and find
you don't need to manipulate it than to enter it into Word and find out that
you do.

Case in point: We are often (as in routinely) given pages and pages of Word
text laid out neatly in columns of information with a final column or two
requiring numeric entry, where one column is a unit of measure and the final
column is currency (cost). We end up replicating the pages and pages of Word
in Excel so that we can use Excel's math abilities to ensure that our cost
estimates are accurate and return the pricing schedule to the client in the
layout they've insisted that it be in when returned.

Of course, it could be worse, they could provide it all as an uneditable,
uncopyable .PDF file ... and yeah, some of them have figured that one out and
that's what we get from them. Arrrrggggggghhhhhhh!