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Excel is an invaluable tool for professionals and students alike, providing a powerful platform for data manipulation and analysis. This tutorial will demonstrate how to use Excel to remove the first four characters from a string of text, a useful task for cleaning up data sets for further analysis.
Often you may want to remove the first 4 characters from a string in Excel.
You can use the RIGHT function combined with the LEN function to do so:
=RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-4)
This particular formula removes the first 4 characters from the string in cell A2.
The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.
Example: Remove First 4 Characters from String in Excel
Suppose we have the following list of basketball team names:
Suppose we would like to remove the first four characters from each team name.
We can type the following formula into cell B2 to do so:
=RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-4)
We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B:
Column B now displays the team names in column A with the first four characters removed from each team name.
How This Formula Works
The RIGHT() function in Excel extracts a specific number of characters from the right side of a string.
The LEN() function in Excel is used to find the length of a string.
Thus, our formula displays the entire string with the first four characters removed.
Note: Blank spaces at the start of a string count as characters. You may need to first remove blank spaces to get your desired result.