How can I add text in the middle of a cell in Excel?

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Adding text in the middle of a cell in Excel can be done by using the “Concatenate” function. This function allows you to combine multiple text strings or cell contents into one cell. To add text in the middle of a cell, first select the cell where you want the text to be added. Then, use the “Concatenate” function to combine the text before and after the desired insertion point, along with the text you want to add. This will result in the added text being placed in the middle of the cell. Alternatively, you can also use the “Insert” feature to insert a new text box in the middle of a cell and type in the desired text. Both methods allow for adding text in the middle of a cell in Excel.

Excel: Add Text in the Middle of a Cell

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:

Excel add text in middle of cell

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.

Additional Resources

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Excel:

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