UNICHAR in Google Sheets: Code Points, Symbols and Cleanup

• Introduced: first introduction date is not established by the reviewed official history; no desktop release number is inferred.
• Availability: documented in the rolling Google Sheets service; these examples use the web worksheet workflow.
• Checked: October 14, 2026; official UNICHAR reference. Documentation and independent models, with no native Sheets execution or wider client certification.

=UNICHAR(number)

The reference describes support for Unicode character representations and warns that behavior can evolve with the character set. That does not make a font’s displayed glyph the definition of the stored text. A character can exist even if a chosen font does not render it clearly.

The worked controls use known individual code points. Fractional numeric inputs, malformed surrogate values, direct text coercion and every upper-bound case are not assigned an undocumented error policy here. Google’s displayed error spelling is #VALUE; exact native punctuation has not been captured.

Enter these numeric code points in A2:A7. In B2 use =UNICHAR(A2) and fill down:

For an inverse check, put =UNICODE(B2) in C2 and fill down. The expected results are 68, 100, 937, 176, 8804 and 8226. These are independent code-point checks of the displayed examples.

The degree sign is not the letter o, and ≤ is one specified character rather than the two-character sequence <=. Visual resemblance does not make those strings identical.

With numeric 22 in E2, use:

=E2&UNICHAR(176)&"C"

The expected label is 22°C. This concatenation produces a text label; E2 remains the numeric temperature for calculations.

For an instructional threshold label, ="Limit "&UNICHAR(8804)&" 30" gives Limit ≤ 30. This is descriptive text, not an Excel-style comparison expression and not a validation rule automatically applied to other cells.

Use words as well as symbols where meaning matters. A symbol alone may be unfamiliar or render poorly in a collaborator’s chosen font.

Construct H2 as follows:

="South"&UNICHAR(160)&"Gate"

The separator is a nonbreaking space. =UNICODE(MID(H2,6,1)) returns the independently expected code point 160.

In H3 use:

=SUBSTITUTE(H2,UNICHAR(160)," ")

Now =UNICODE(MID(H3,6,1)) returns 32, the ordinary space. The label still looks much like South Gate, but the exact separator has changed.

This is a controlled replacement of one known code point. It does not remove all invisible characters, normalize every language’s text or establish how every cleanup function treats Unicode whitespace. Keep the raw column when applying such a rule to imported labels.

=UNICHAR(233) produces precomposed é. =UNICHAR(101)&UNICHAR(769) constructs an e followed by a combining acute accent. Their first code points are 233 and 101 respectively, even if the rendered text looks similar.

Google’s own UNICHAR example describes code point 307 as the character U+0133, ij, while its small rendered table displays “ij.” That visual representation is not evidence that every client expands one code point into two separate Latin letters. The examples here avoid using that table to infer a length or normalization rule.

The documented zero control =UNICHAR(0) is an error, not an empty-string generator. For a deliberately empty text result, use "" in the appropriate formula instead of choosing an invalid code point.

Use UNICODE to inspect the first character and SUBSTITUTE for a targeted replacement. CHAR is also documented through Google’s Unicode table; do not import another product’s legacy character-table assumptions into a Sheets workbook.

All successful identities above are independently checked. No font, mobile-client, combined-emoji length or native surrogate behavior is certified by these simple controls.

• Google UNICHAR reference.
• Editorial testing standards.

Examples use fictional data, English function names and comma separators. Expected outputs are independent mathematical calculations or explicitly documented rules, not native Sheets captures. Check the spreadsheet locale when reproducing punctuation-sensitive formulas.