Excel Formula: Make text same length
If there is a list of texts with different lengths, for looking nicer, you can make these text with same length by adding trailing characters as below screenshot shown. Here it provides a formula which combines the LEN and REPT functions to handle it in Excel.
Generic formula:
| =text&REPT("char",fix_length-LEN(text)) |
Arguments
| Text: the cell or text you want to change it to a fixed length. |
| Fix_length: the length of characters you want to use. |
| Char: the specific character you used to fix the length of text with. |
How this formula work
Here will change the text strings in range C3:C7 to the same length – 8 characters, and output the results in range D3:D7, please use below formula in cell D3:
| =C3&REPT("-",8-LEN(C3)) |
Press Enter key, the drag fill handle from D3 to D7 to change the texts to same length.
Explanation
LEN function: tthe LEN function counts the number of characters in the text.
REPT function: the REPT function repeats a character specific number of times. Here the formula =REPT("-",8-LEN(C3)) will repeat the character "-" a specific number of times based on the length of text in C3. You can see this formula as
=REPT("-",8-LEN(C3))
= REPT("-",8-7)
= REPT("-",1)
Remark
If you want to add leading characters to make the texts in fixed length, you can use this formula
| =REPT("char",fix_length-LEN(text))&text |
Sample File
Click to download sample fileRelative Formulas
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