Changing text string appearances in Airtable

This content 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() function 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

• Alternatively, UPPER("The dog is a good boy") produces: THE DOG IS A GOOD BOY

In practice, your formula will be LOWER({A field containing text strings}) or UPPER({A field containing text strings}) and the formula will modify the text from the field you input in the formula to be all lowercase or uppercase.

TRIM()

The TRIM() function serves a singular purpose: to remove blank space from the beginning and/or end of a string. Let's see what that looks like in action: TRIM(" Lorem ipsum odor amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. ") results in "Lorem ipsum odor amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit." 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 the LEN() function, which determines string length, alongside the TRIM() function like so:

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.