Changing text string appearances in Airtable

This content is part of a guided course that covers a few ways to change the look of the text string using the LOWER, UPPER, and TRIM functions. 

LOWER() and UPPER()

The LOWER function takes a text string and makes all the characters lowercase, while the UPPER changes all characters in a string of text to uppercase.

For example, LOWER("The dog is a Good Boy.") produces: the dog is a good boy.UPPER produces: THE DOG IS A GOOD BOY.

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.