Changing the look of a text string

This article covers a few ways that you can change the look of the text string using the following functions:

• LOWER
• UPPER
• TRIM

This article is part of a guided course which you can view here. Note that we do not currently offer the ability to change either the font or color of text strings at this time.

LOWER() and UPPER()

The LOWER function takes a string of text and makes all the characters lowercase. Conversely, UPPER changes all characters in a string of text to uppercase. On their own, these functions can help you ensure text is kept in the appropriate case.

Their functionality is very straightforward: LOWER("The dog is a Good Boy.") produces the following result: the dog is a good boy.

Alternatively, replacing LOWER with UPPER accomplishes the opposite result: THE DOG IS A GOOD BOY.

Naturally, you can use a field name for more dynamic results: UPPER({Doggo Encouragement}).

TRIM()

The TRIM function serves a singular purpose: to remove blank space from the beginning and end of a string. Let's see what that looks like in action: TRIM("Ada Lovelace") results in "Ada Lovelace" as an output.

The function works similarly with a field as an input:

TRIM  ({Text Field}) 

The results will include the contents of the text field in each record without blank spaces at the beginning and end.

Combined with other functions, TRIM can help you accomplish more. For example, if you want a character count for a text field but don't want to count blank spaces at the beginning and/or end, then you can use this formula:

LEN(TRIM({Text Field}))

Note that when using the TRIM() function any blank spaces outside of the beginning or end of the string will not be removed. If you wanted to remove all of the blank spaces from a string, then another formula would work better in this instance. For instance, something like:

SUBSTITUTE({Name}," ","")

This is helpful if you need to remove blank spaces when creating username variants of a person's full name, make text more URL-friendly, remove spaces from a long number so you can work with it as a number (rather than text), or any other situation where you need to get rid of spaces.