Extracting Text With LEFT and RIGHT

Spreadsheets are full of text that needs to be pulled apart. Maybe you have product codes where the first two letters mean a category, or phone numbers where you only want the area code.

Instead of editing every cell by hand, you can use text functions to grab exactly the characters you need. The two simplest are LEFT and RIGHT. They pull characters from the start or the end of a piece of text.

The LEFT function returns characters from the beginning of a text string. It takes two pieces of information:

• The text (or a cell holding text)
• How many characters to grab

So LEFT("Spreadsheet", 6) returns Spread. It starts at the far left and counts six characters to the right.