Excel Tip of the Week: Text Functions

Today’s topic is text functions.

Excel has many functions that allow you to slice and dice the text in a cell in any way you want. Today I’ll show you three very useful functions for editing text.

1. LEFT: 

LEFT is really straight-forward. You point the function to a cell with text and then tell it how many characters you want from that text starting from the left. Here is a screen shot of an example:

2. RIGHT:

RIGHT is basically the same as LEFT, but it starts at the right of the text and returns a specified number of characters. Example:

3. MID:

MID is slightly more complex, but not too much. You start the same by pointing the function to a cell with text. Your second argument is the start number. This is the character number (counting from the left) you want the function to start at. Finally you tell it how many characters to grab. Example:

Notice I started at the 6^th character. This is because the space between “Rock” and  “and” counted as the 5^th character. This is an easy point to overlook when building a MID formula.

These functions probably don’t seem super useful at first, but when combined with other functions (which I’ll cover in later posts) they can be very powerful tools.