What does the '' symbol do in Excel?

Answer 1

It indicates text. You usually use a pair of quotes to symbolise text, often within formulas. If you don't have something to indicate text, then Excel will think it refers to a particular thing in a spreadsheet, which it then cannot find. If you want to find the length of a piece of text, you can use the LEN function. If you type the text into a cell, you can refer to that cell directly. If you had some text in cell A3, then the following formula will tell you how long the text is:

=LEN(A3)

In this case Excel knows that A3 refers to a cell. If you do the following formula you will get an error:

=LEN(John)

This is because it does not know what John is. It is not a cell like A3 is and it does not refer to anything else. If you want to find the length of the word John, then you would have to do it like this:

=LEN("John")

Now Excel knows you are referring to a piece of text, so it will give the answer 4.