PADSTART

Prepends a character to the text until it reaches a length of count.

Syntax:

PADSTART(text, count, character)

text is the text that we want to add padding to.

count is how long you want the new value to be.

character is optional, default is a space if no character is specified, otherwise PADSTART will use the specified character.

Example:

If text contains Hello, count contains 12 and no specified character:

PADSTART("Hello", 12)

returns " Hello"

If text contains Hello, count contains 12 and character contains !:

PADSTART("Hello", 12, "!")

returns "!!!!!!!Hello"

Text:

Count:

Character:

Result:

!!!!!!!Hello

Application:

Imagine you're managing a database for a small library. The library has a system where each book is assigned a unique identifier (BookID). These BookIDs are a combination of a prefix and a number. For consistency and ease of sorting, the numerical part of the BookID must always have a specific number of digits, say, five. However, as new books are added, the numbers are simply incremented (e.g., 1, 2, 3...).

This is where PADSTART becomes incredibly useful. You can use it to automatically format the BookID so that the numerical part is always five digits long, by padding the beginning with zeros.

Here's a table showing how the PADSTART function would work in this scenario:

	Original Book Number	PADSTART(Original Book Number, 5, '0')	Final Book ID
	A	B	C
1	1	00001	LB-00001
2	27	00027	LB-00027
3	456	00456	LB-00456
4	1234	01234	LB-01234
5	98765	98765	LB-98765

In this example:

The PADSTART function takes the Book Number as input.
The second argument, 5, specifies that the final string should be five characters long.
The third argument, '0', specifies the character to use for padding.

The function checks the length of the Book Number. If it's less than five characters, it adds '0's to the beginning until the total length is five. This ensures that every BookID follows a consistent format, making it easier to search, sort, and display in the library's system.