
Tips.Net > ExcelTips Home > Formulas > Replacing Dashes with Periods
Summary: Replacing one character in a text value with another character is easy. All you need to do is use the SUBSTITUTE function, as illustrated in this tip. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, Excel 2003, and Excel 2007.)
If you have a need to normalize the appearance of your data, you might want to replace any dashes in a text string with periods. For instance, if you have a phone number such as "123-555-1212" you might want to change it to "123.555.1212". This is easy to do using the SUBSTITUTE function:
=SUBSTITUTE(A7,"-",".")
The result is that any dashes appearing in the string in cell A7 are replaced with periods.
Tip #2995 applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 2000 2002 2003 2007
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