I am trying to run the IF function in excel against text rather numerical values. However it does not seem to want to process the argument. Is there a way to get this to work?

Cheers

Are you enclosing the test in double quotation marks? For example:

=if(d6="hello","hi","goodbye") or =if(d6="hello",0,1)

It would have helped if you show us what formula you are entering, but you do need to surround text strings with quotes.