Reverse text in Excel: flip characters in a cell

The tool in this article is available in !SEMTools Lite and Pro.

Reversing text in an Excel cell sounds like a joke task until you actually need it. How do you turn “Excel” into “lecxE”, or “12345” into “54321”? Excel has no built-in function for this, but there are plenty of solutions: from a single formula in Excel 365 to flipping a whole column in place in a couple of clicks.

If you need to swap words rather than letters, see how to change the word order in a cell.

Why reverse text in a cell

Reversing a string is not just a party trick. Flipped text comes in handy in real tasks:

• Searching from the end of a string — SEARCH and FIND only look from left to right. Reverse the string, and the last occurrence becomes the first.
• Checking palindromes — a word or phrase reads the same both ways if it matches its reversed copy: “level”, “Never odd or even”.
• Mirrored codes and IDs — for example, to find item numbers that were typed backwards by mistake.
• Puzzles and training tasks — simple ciphers, brain teasers, right-to-left text.

Reverse text with a formula in Excel 365

In Excel 365 and Excel 2021, you can reverse text with one formula. It uses MID, LEN, SEQUENCE and CONCAT:

=CONCAT(MID(A1,SEQUENCE(LEN(A1),,LEN(A1),-1),1))

This formula takes the text in A1 and joins its characters in reverse order, from the last one to the first.

How the formula works

• LEN(A1) returns the text length, for example 5 for “Excel”;
• SEQUENCE(5,,5,-1) builds the positions in reverse order: {5;4;3;2;1};
• MID(A1,{5;4;3;2;1},1) takes one character from each position and returns the array {“l”;”e”;”c”;”x”;”E”};
• CONCAT joins the array into one string: “lecxE”.

Excel 2019: TEXTJOIN as an array formula

Excel 2019 has no SEQUENCE, so we calculate the reversed positions with ROW and INDIRECT and join the result with TEXTJOIN:

=TEXTJOIN("",TRUE,MID(A1,LEN(A1)-ROW(INDIRECT("1:"&LEN(A1)))+1,1))

Important: in Excel 2019 this is an array formula, so enter it with Ctrl+Shift+Enter. With a plain Enter, the result will be wrong.

Reverse text in Excel 2010–2016 with a VBA function

Excel 2016 and earlier have neither CONCAT nor TEXTJOIN, and regular functions can’t join an array of characters. You’re left with either a long chain of MID calls, one per position, or a custom function. The second option is easier: VBA has a built-in StrReverse function, you only need to make it available on the sheet.

1. Press Alt+F11 to open the VBA editor.
2. Choose Insert → Module.
3. Paste the code below and close the editor.

Function REVERSETEXT(s As String) As String
    REVERSETEXT = StrReverse(s)
End Function

Now this formula works on the sheet:

=REVERSETEXT(A1)

To be fair, the function works only in this workbook, and you’ll have to save it as .xlsm. To use it in every file, put the code in your Personal Macro Workbook, but then you need to call it with the workbook name:

=PERSONAL.XLSB!REVERSETEXT(A1)

Reverse text in cells in place with !SEMTools

All the formulas above share one drawback: the result appears in a helper column. Then you have to paste it as values and delete the source column. Many of us would rather flip the text right in the source cells, with no formulas or macros.

That’s what the !SEMTools tool is for. Select the cells or a whole column, then on the !SEMTools tab choose CHANGE → Cells → Flip → Characters. Voilà! The text in every selected cell is reversed right in place. The tool works in any Excel version from 2010 on.

By the way, the same menu also flips the order of words, if you want “buy iphone case” to become “case iphone buy” rather than “esac enohpi yub”.

Reversed text in practice: palindromes and searching from the end

Here is what reversing looks like on real examples:

Check whether a phrase is a palindrome

For “Never odd or even” to count as a palindrome, remove the spaces and convert the text to lowercase before comparing. With LET in Excel 365, the formula stays compact:

=LET(t,LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(A1," ","")),t=CONCAT(MID(t,SEQUENCE(LEN(t),,LEN(t),-1),1)))

The formula cleans the text, reverses it and compares it with the original: TRUE means a palindrome, FALSE means it’s not. If the phrase contains commas or other punctuation, remove them too, or the formula will return FALSE.

Find the position of the last space by reversing

A classic trick: reverse the string, find the space with a regular SEARCH and convert the position back:

=LEN(A1)-SEARCH(" ",CONCAT(MID(A1,SEQUENCE(LEN(A1),,LEN(A1),-1),1)))+1

For “ab cd efgh” the formula returns 6, the position of the last space. Other ways to solve this, including ones without reversing, are covered in the article on searching from the end of a string in Excel.

Why text doesn’t reverse correctly: common mistakes

• The number turned into text. Reversing formulas always return text: “54321” looks like a number but isn’t summed. Put two minus signs before the formula (a double negation, see the example below) to get a number. Note that leading zeros disappear: reversing “1200” gives “0021”, and as a number it’s 21.
• Dates and formatted numbers reverse “strangely”. Excel stores a date as a number, so the formula reverses 10/18/2026 as “31364”, the serial number of the day read backwards. To reverse what you see in the cell, first convert the value to text with TEXT.
• Emoji and rare characters break. Excel functions work with UTF-16 characters, and an emoji is two characters for them. When reversed, the halves swap places, and you get squares instead of the emoji.
• The formula shows #NAME?. Your Excel version doesn’t have SEQUENCE or CONCAT. Use the Excel 2019 version or the VBA function.

This is how to reverse a number and keep it a number:

=--CONCAT(MID(A1,SEQUENCE(LEN(A1),,LEN(A1),-1),1))

Summary: which way to reverse text

I hope you found what you were looking for on this page and were able to reverse the characters in your cells. In Excel 365, a SEQUENCE formula is enough for a one-off task. In Excel 2019, TEXTJOIN as an array formula does the job, and in older versions, a VBA function. For regular work with large data sets, the !SEMTools tool is the easiest option: it changes the text right in the source cells, with no formulas to clean up afterwards.

You may also be interested in related operations: add text to multiple cells at once, or see all tools for changing cells in the add-in.