 Numbers are probably what come to mind for most people when they think about spreadsheets, and that's reasonable, because I'm willing to bet that most spreadsheets are in fact filled with numbers. But spreadsheets are more powerful than that and more flexible. They can use text as well, which is good, because when you're working in an organizational setting, chances are you're going to have to work with a lot of text, like people's names and their addresses and what their last orders were. And the nice thing is you can work with that. I want to show you a few specific functions that can be very helpful in particular dealing with names in Google Sheets. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you these using the name Ruth St. Dennis. Now, if you don't know Ruth St. Dennis, she's one of the founders of American modern dance. And even though her name looks like it should be pronounced Ruth Sandini, she's American, so it's St. Dennis. The first thing we want to do is simply find out how many characters there are in a cell. And that's a really simple one, because we have a function called lend for length. And it counts the number of letters and spaces and punctuation. So we have 14 pieces of information in this particular cell. Great, that's a starting point for a lot of other things. Now we might be looking for a particular piece of text. And in this case, I'm going to look for the first space, because for a lot of people, that's going to separate their first name from their last name. And the function I use for that is called find. You simply need to tell it what is your trying to find. And I have quotation marks with a space that I put in between them says find the first space in this cell and return its location, which is the number. And it's five, because we have Ruth is one, two, three, four letters and the space is the fifth thing in that particular cell. Next, we want to select the text up to the first blank that is get her first name. And the way we're going to do that is with the function left, left says, start at the left in this cell and go how far I'm saying five characters. And the reason I know five is because that's what we got when we were looking for the first blank here. And we do that, we get her first name, Ruth. Now, to get her last name, I'm going to say, get everything else. Now, because 14, which is the total length, minus five, which is where the first space is 14 minus five is nine. I'm going to simply do that. This one, however, is going to be starting from the right. And so I use the function right, says go to the end of this cell and then count back to the left nine spaces that gets us to the S in St. Dennis. And there's her first name. Also, a lot of times when you get information in your spreadsheet, it might be a little weird, you might have spaces where they shouldn't be I have spaces before the name after the name. And you often want to clean those things up so things work a little better. So for instance, I have Ruth St. Dennis here. And you may not be able to tell but there are three spaces before her name. And there are also three spaces after her name. So we're going to get rid of those by using a function developed specifically for this called trim. And it gets rid of all of the leading and trailing spaces. And so now we have Ruth St. Dennis without the stuff before or after. Now, you may have guessed that it's possible to combine all of these in a logical algebra for processing text. So for instance, maybe you have people entering their names all in one cell when they're filling out a form on your web page. So here I have Ruth St. Dennis. I want to split it into her first name and last name because that's how I want to store it in my database. I can combine these functions and this is going to be a little complicated. But here's how it works. I get Ruth, but the way I got it was by first saying go to cell B nine that's where the name is, go to the left and then find the first space in that cell and then trim everything that comes after it. And when I do that, I get Ruth. If I want just her last name, I can use the complement of that. And in this case, it looks like this. We're going to do a combination of get the right, which is how I got the last name, but we have to do the length of the whole cell minus the space up to the first space. And then we trim the extra stuff at the end. And so yeah, there's a lot of parentheses here and it's a little complicated, which is why I actually do use this formula. I have a database with names in it. And I do this to rearrange the way they come in natively, so that they make more sense to me. And so I have to use all this stuff. But I tell you, it takes me a few minutes to get it all worked out. But then I just copy it drag it down and it takes care of everything in the spreadsheet. It's really nice. On the other hand, what if things come last name comma first name? Well, then you simply do a little bit of rearranging. In this case, you're going to do the trimming you're simply switching what we had here to over here. That's quick and easy. You're searching for the comma in this case. And you're getting the stuff that it comes after the comma but trimming the spaces. And then the last one is for the last name, you do have to make one small modification here. And that is you have to tell it, we're going to find the comma. We're going to get the left part. But you need to include this minus one to adjust the selection because you're doing from the comma. And then you trim the blank spaces. And then you have what you need. And so all of these are different functions. In fact, let me turn on the variable view, the function view. And now you can see what's going on as a way of cleaning up organizing and getting the information you need. So you can stick it in your own customer database and get it set up. So you can then process it using other functions that can combine text and numbers and whatever else you need to suit your purposes.