IMPORTANT: In Excel 2016, Excel Mobile, and Excel Online, this function has been replaced with the CONCAT function (see the last functions blog). Although the CONCATENATE function is still available for backward compatibility, you should consider using CONCAT from now on.

More and more users are migrating to the Office 365 subscription model and with that comes great power, well Excel 2016 anyway. And some versions of Office 365 Excel 2016 are getting six new functions to play with. The roll-out started in late February 2016 and continues to this very day.

Imagine this complex function. This function converts real and imaginary coefficients into a complex number of the form x + yi or x + yj, where i or j denotes the square root of -1....

This function returns the number of combinations (with repetitions) for a given number of items.

Are you often COMBIN the Excel functions to see how many subsets you can make? This function returns the number of combinations for a given number of items (i.e. the number of distinct subsets of items where order is unimportant). You should use COMBIN to determine the total possible number of groups for a given number of items.

This is one of the pillars of Excel’s features. Yes, the jokes get no better...

The COLUMN function Ah, it’s time for my Lord of the Rings impersonation. What do I mean? “COLUMN” (try saying it out loud if you don’t understand – this joke is precious). This function returns the column number of the given cell reference. For example, the formula =COLUMN(D10) returns the value 4, because column D represents the fourth column.

If you find it CODE outside, this function may assist you. CODE returns a numeric code (great dictionary definition) for the first character in a text string. The returned code corresponds to the character set used by your computer.

Need to make a CLEAN getaway? This function removes all nonprintable characters from text. And I’m not talking about expletives...

Do you choose to use CHOOSE? This function uses index_num to return a value from the list of value arguments...