What PHONETIC does
PHONETIC extracts furigana from text that contains phonetic characters. It is a specialized text function, but useful when a workbook stores East Asian text with pronunciation data.
Practical examples
Return the phonetic text from one cell
=PHONETIC(C4)
Use this when a single cell contains text with furigana and you want only the phonetic form.
Use a range reference
=PHONETIC(B7:B9)
When you pass a range, Excel returns the furigana from the upper-left cell of that range.
Common mistakes and notes
Regional settings matter
Microsoft notes that PHONETIC requires a Far East language region setting such as Japanese, Chinese, or Korean.
Nonadjacent ranges return an error
If the reference uses nonadjacent cells, Microsoft documents that PHONETIC returns #N/A.