Text arguments

Some formulas require text as arguments. In such cases, the text can be supplied either directly into the function by surrounding the text by double quotes, or by cell reference, in which case quotes are not required.

Some examples of functions that require text as arguments are:

WPGET(document, fieldname), LEFT(text, num_chars) and UPPER(text)

where the text arguments are highlighted in bold.

For example, suppose you wanted to put the sentence "Have a nice day" into uppercase, use one of the following methods:

UPPER("Have a nice day")

UPPER(A1)

where A1 contains the text: Have a nice day without any quotes.

Text arguments containing quotes

Suppose the text argument itself contains one or more quotes. For example, "Have a "nice" day". The quotes within the text need to be treated as a special case, so that Ability knows where an argument begins and ends. This is done by "escaping" the character, using the caret (^) as follows:

UPPER("Have a ^"nice^" day")

Note that the quotes surrounding the word nice are each preceded by the caret. The same thing can be achieved using a cell reference without the need for escaping characters:

UPPER(A1)

where A1 contains the text Have a "nice" day and the function will still work as expected.

If your text contains a caret, you need to escape the caret itself, so:

UPPER("The caret is denoted by the ^^ symbol")

returns the text: THE CARET IS DENOTED BY THE ^ SYMBOL.