ASC in Google Sheets: Standardize Full-Width Labels

An imported stock list contains ＰＥＮ－０７, while your lookup table uses PEN-07. Put the cleaned label in a separate column so you can inspect the change before replacing any source data.

=ASC(text)

The single input is text or a reference to it. Google specifies conversion of full-width ASCII and Katakana to half-width forms; standard-width characters stay as they are. This is width conversion, not an ASCII character-code lookup. Google’s ASC reference defines that scope.

Enter these exact strings in A2:A5. In B2 enter =ASC(A2) and copy it through B5.

These are independently checked expectations under the documented mapping, not observations from a running Google worksheet. For A2, each Latin letter, hyphen and digit becomes its standard-width counterpart. A4 illustrates a mixed label: Box- already has the desired width.

For a self-contained check, =ASC("ＰＥＮ－０７") has the same expected result as B2. The quotation marks delimit the text and are not part of the label.

Do not overwrite column A immediately. A product code can be width-normalized without being the right product code. Compare the cleaned column against a known list, review duplicates, and decide whether the original spelling needs to remain available for an audit or printed label. A width change alone does not validate an identifier.

• An unchanged result can be correct: inspect whether the input was already standard width.
• The Japanese result may contain more code points. In the example, ペ becomes ﾍ plus the half-width semi-voiced mark ﾟ; do not assume one input character always produces one output character.
• A result is still Japanese text. Width conversion does not translate a word into Latin letters.
• If the task is accent removal or general Unicode normalization, do not use these examples as proof that ASC performs it. The documented contract is narrower.

This guide concerns a cached Google Sheets help snapshot retrieved on 19 October 2026; its crawl age was reported as “last week.” No minimum release or desktop-spreadsheet equivalence is established here. Python Unicode mappings were used only to cross-check the listed strings, not to substitute a general normalization algorithm for ASC. Native execution and screenshots remain pending.

Use CODE or UNICODE when investigating character values. Use CHAR for the reverse kind of task. Those operations answer a different question from label-width cleanup.