Excel: Add Text in the Middle of a Cell

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You can use the following syntax to add text in the middle of a cell in Excel:

=LEFT(A2,1) & "-Employee-" & MID(A2,2,LEN(A2))

This particular formula adds the text “-Employee-” in the middle of cell A2 immediately after the first character in the cell.

The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.

Example: How to Add Text in the Middle of a Cell in Excel

Suppose we have the following column of employee ID’s in Excel:

Now suppose we would like to add the text “-Employee-” in the middle of each cell directly after the first letter in the employee ID.

We can type the following formula into cell B2 to do so:

=LEFT(A2,1) & "-Employee-" & MID(A2,2,LEN(A2))

We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B:

Column B now contains the text in column A with “-Employee-” added in the middle of it.

Note that if you’d like to add text after a different number of letters in the beginning of the cell, then you simply need to change the values in the LEFT and MID functions of the formula.

For example, suppose we instead have the following column of employee ID’s:

We could type the following formula into cell B2 to add the text “-Employee-” after the first three characters in the cell:

=LEFT(A2,3) & "-Employee-" & MID(A2,4,LEN(A2))

We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B:

Column B now contains the text in column A with “-Employee-” added in the middle of it.

How This Formula Works

Recall the formula that we used to add “-Employee-” in the middle of cell A2:

=LEFT(A2,1) & "-Employee-" & MID(A2,2,LEN(A2))

Here is how this formula works:

Cell A2 contains A004.

First, we use LEFT(A2, 1) to extract the first letter from the left of the text in cell A2. This returns A.

Then we use the & symbol to concatenate the text “-Employee-” to the A.

Lastly, we use MID(A2, 2, LEN(A2)) to extract the text starting from the second character in the cell all the way to the last character in the cell. This returns 004.

The end result is that we concatenate together A with -Employee- with 004 to end up with A-Employee-004.

This same process is repeated for each cell in the column.