How can I remove the last 4 characters from a string in Excel?

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To remove the last 4 characters from a string in Excel, you can use the “LEFT” function and specify the number of characters you want to keep. This function will return the leftmost characters from the string, excluding the last 4 characters. Alternatively, you can also use the “LEN” function to determine the length of the string and then use the “LEFT” function with a subtracted value of 4. This will effectively remove the last 4 characters from the string.

Excel: Remove Last 4 Characters from String

Often you may want to remove the last 4 characters from a string in Excel.

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

=LEFT(A2,LEN(A2)-4)

This particular formula removes the last 4 characters from the string in cell A2.

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

Example: Remove Last 4 Characters from String in Excel

Suppose we have the following list of basketball team names:

Suppose we would like to remove the last 4 characters from each team name.

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

=LEFT(A2,LEN(A2)-4)

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

Excel remove last 4 characters from string

Column B now displays the team names in column A with the last 4 characters removed from each team name.

How This Formula Works

Recall the formula that we used to remove the last 4 characters from the string in cell A2:

=LEFT(A2,LEN(A2)-4)

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

Thus, our formula tells Excel to extract the amount of characters equal to the length of the string minus 4 characters starting from the left side of the string.

Thus, our formula displays the entire string with the last 4 characters removed.

Note: Blank spaces in a string count as characters. You may need to first remove blank spaces to get your desired result.

Additional Resources

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


Excel: A Formula for MID From Right
Excel: How to Use MID Function for Variable Length Strings

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