How do I extract the first 5 characters from a cell in Excel?

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To extract the first 5 characters from a cell in Excel, you can use the LEFT function. This function allows you to specify the number of characters you want to extract from the left side of the cell. Simply select the cell you want to extract from, type “=LEFT(” and then specify the cell reference and the number of characters you want to extract, and close the formula with a closing parenthesis. This will return the first 5 characters from the cell.

You can use the following formula to extract the first five characters from a string in Excel:

=LEFT(A2, 5)

This particular formula extracts the first five characters from cell A2.

For example, if cell A2 contains Mavericks then this formula will return Maver.

Note: If the cell contains spaces in the first five characters then these spaces will be counted towards the total character count of five.

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

Example: How to Extract First Five Characters from Cell in Excel

Suppose we have the following column of basketball team names in Excel:

Suppose we would like to extract the first five characters from each cell in column A.

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

=LEFT(A2, 5)

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

Excel extract first 5 characters from cell

Column B now contains the first character from each corresponding cell in column A.

For example:

  • The formula extracts Maver from Mavericks
  • The formula extracts Spurs from Spurs
  • The formula extracts Rocke from Rockets

Note that this formula uses the LEFT function to extract a specific number of characters from the left of each string.

If your string contains a blank space as the first character, then this formula will simply return a blank space.

To ignore leading blanks, you can use the TRIM function within the LEFT function as follows:

=LEFT(TRIM(A2), 5)

Note: You can find the complete documentation for the LEFT function in Excel .

Additional Resources

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

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