Google Sheets: How to remove first 3 characters from a string

Hello,

In this article we will be discussing how to remove first 3 characters from a string in Google Sheets.

We will be using the following formula:

=SUBSTITUTE(A1,”ABC”,””)

This formula will replace the first 3 characters of the string in cell A1 with an empty string.

You can also use this formula to remove first N characters from a string, where N is any number.

Thank you for reading!


Often you may want to remove the first 3 characters from a string in Google Sheets.

You can use the RIGHT function combined with the LEN function to do so:

=RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-3)

This particular formula removes the first 3 characters from the string in cell A2.

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

Example: Remove First 3 Characters from String in Google Sheets

Suppose we have the following list of basketball team names:

Suppose we would like to remove the first three characters from each team name.

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

=RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-3)

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

Google Sheets remove first 3 characters from string

Column B now displays the team names in column A with the first three characters removed from each team name.

How This Formula Works

The RIGHT() function in Google Sheets extracts a specific number of characters from the right side of a string.

The LEN() function in Google Sheets is used to find the length of a string.

Thus, our formula displays the entire string with the first three characters removed.

Note #1: Blank spaces at the start of a string count as characters. You may need to first remove blank spaces to get your desired result.

Note #2: To remove a different number of starting characters from a string, simply change the 3 in the formula to a different value.

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