EXACT

What does this function do?

This function compares two text items and determines if they are exactly the same.

Character case is considered – only words written identically and having upper and lower case characters in the same positions will be considered equal.

Syntax

=EXACT(text1, text2)

Only two arguments can be compared.

Formatting

Like all text functions, the function converts numeric format to natural numbers before comparison. Therefore, the function considers 200% and 2 (initially in numeric format) as matching text values.

This applies to formatting as date, date-time, time, percentage, and financial format.

EXACT function usage examples

The function can be convenient when you need to find letters in a specific case in a cell – for example, uppercase or lowercase.

Find any uppercase letters

To search for uppercase letters, we’ll use logic and the LOWER function.

The logic is as follows:

1. convert the cell value to lowercase
2. compare the result with the original cell value
3. if FALSE is returned – there was at least one uppercase letter
4. Voila!

Here’s the formula:

=NOT(EXACT(LOWER(A1), A1))

Find any lowercase letters

Here’s a similar formula, but with the UPPER function:

=NOT(EXACT(UPPER(A1), A1))

Find if there are letters in a cell

If you check whether the cell values in uppercase and lowercase match, you can identify if there are letters in it. If a letter was in lowercase, it will become uppercase, and if in uppercase – lowercase, and only if there are no letters in the cell, it will remain the same as it was. Hieroglyphs don’t count.

Makes sense, right? :)

The corresponding formula:

=NOT(EXACT(UPPER(A1), LOWER(A1)))

This post is also available in RU.