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The process of extracting text after the nth character in Microsoft Excel involves using the “RIGHT” function, which allows you to specify the number of characters you want to extract from a cell. This function can be combined with other functions, such as “LEN” to determine the length of the text in the cell, and “MID” to specify the starting position for the extraction. By inputting the desired starting position and the number of characters to extract, you can easily retrieve the desired text from a cell in Excel. This feature is particularly useful for manipulating and organizing large amounts of data in a spreadsheet.
Excel: Extract Text After nth Character
You can use the following syntax to extract the text after the nth character in a cell in Excel:
=MID(A2, 3+1, LEN(A2))
This particular formula extracts the text after the 3rd character in cell A2.
The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.
Example: Extract Text After nth Character in Excel
Suppose we have the following list of basketball team names in Excel:
Suppose we would like to extract all of the text after the third character from each cell in column A.
We can type the following formula into cell B2 to do so:
=MID(A2, 3+1, LEN(A2))
We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B:
Column B now contains all of the text in column A after the third character.
To extract the text after a different character, simply change the 3 in the formula to a different number.
For example, you could instead use the following formula to extract all of the text after the 4th character:
=MID(A2, 4+1, LEN(A2))
The following screenshot shows how to use this formula in practice:
Column B now contains all of the text in column A after the fourth character.
How This Formula Works
Recall the formula we used to extract all of the text after the third character from cell A2:
=MID(A2, 3+1, LEN(A2))
This function uses the MID function, which extracts the text from a specific cell using a starting position and ending position.
In this example, we specify that we would like to extract the text from cell A2.
Then we specify that we’d like the starting position to be 3 + 1 = 4.
Then we use the LEN function specify that we’d like the ending position to be equal to the length of the entire string in cell A2.
The end result is that we extract all text from the fourth character to the last character in the string.
This is equivalent to extracting all of the text after the third character.
Additional Resources
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common operations in Excel: