
After that, you subtract the position of the 1st occurrence from the position of the 2nd occurrence, and subtract 1 from the result since you don't want to include the delimiter character in the resulting substring.įor example, to extract text surrounded by two hyphens, you'd use this formula:. First, you work out the position of the second occurrence of the character by nesting one Search function within another. Num_chars (number of chars to extract) is the trickiest part: Start_num (starting point) - a simple SEARCH formula returns the position of the desired character, to which you add 1 because you want to start extraction with the next character. Text is the cell containing the original text string. The first two arguments of this MID formula are crystal clear: MID( cell, SEARCH(" char", cell)+1, SEARCH (" char", cell, SEARCH (" char", cell)+1) - SEARCH (" char", cell)-1) To extract text from the left of a string, you use the Excel LEFT function: Extract substring from start of string (LEFT) MID function - to extract a substring from the middle of a text string, starting at the point you specify.Īs is the case with other formulas, Excel substring functions are best to learn from an example, so let's look at a few ones. RIGHT function - to extract text from the right. LEFT function - to extract a substring from the left. Depending on where you want to start extraction, use one of these formulas: Microsoft Excel provides three different functions to extract text of a specified length from a cell. EXCEL SEARCH CELL FOR WORD HOW TO
How to extract substring of a certain length Extract text from cell with Ultimate Suite for Excel.How to find substring in Excel (partial match).Pull text between two occurrences of a character.Extract substring before or after a given character.Extract text from the middle of a string.Extract substring of a specified length.Below you will find formula examples to do all this and a lot more. And, there are a handful of other functions to perform more complex operations such as extracting numbers from a string, replacing one substring with another, looking up partial text match, etc. Also, there are FIND and SEARCH functions to get a substring before or after a specific character.
For example, if you type something like "AA-111" in a cell, you'd call it an alphanumeric string, and any part of the string, say "AA", would be a substring.Īlthough there is no such thing as Substring function in Excel, there exist three Text functions (LEFT, RIGHT, and MID) to extract a substring of a given length. So, what is a substring? Simply, it's part of a text entry. The tutorial shows how to use the Substring functions in Excel to extract text from a cell, get a substring before or after a specified character, find cells containing part of a string, and more.īefore we start discussing different techniques to manipulate substrings in Excel, let's just take a moment to define the term so that we can begin on the same page.