The first 32 characters are non-printing 'control codes', most of which are no longer used, with the exception of the carriage return (13), line feed (10), and tab (9).ĪNSI (American National Standards Institute) is a generic term for 8-bit character sets, the default in Windows 95 and Windows NT. These include the numbers 0 to 9, lowercase a-z, uppercase A-Z, and punctuation. The original ASCII specification encodes 128 characters into numbers. ASCII stands for 'American Standard Code for Information Interchange' and is a 7-bit character set that contains characters from 0 to 127. The numbers returned by the CHAR function come from ASCII. CODE performs the reverse of CHAR, taking a character as text and returning a number.
