Want to get free access to our Excel functions course?

Fill in your e-mail address and telephone and we will give you 7 days free access to our course The Excel Functions Guide.

SUBSTITUTE & REPLACE

See more Excel functions
Share

The SUBSTITUTE and REPLACE functions switch a certain string of text with a different one. Each function consists of three arguments, and one optional one.
The SUBSTITUTE function first requires the cell containing the string, the string you want to replace, and then what you want to replace it with.
So we’ll write Equals, SUBSTITUTE, select the cell, type Excel in quotation marks, and substitute it with “Word”. Every instance of the word Excel has now been switched out for Word.
If we happen to know the position in each cell of the string we want to change, we can use the REPLACE function instead. It requires the cell containing the text, the starting position, how many characters after that we want to replace, and then the new text.
So we write Equals REPLACE, 7 for the starting position, 4 for how many characters, and 2010 for the new text.
In this lesson we have looked at two ways to switch out text in a cell, SUBSTITUTE and REPLACE.