How to use Left function in Excel

Left function helps in extracting content from text in an Excel Cell. There can be many use cases where we have to work with Text values in Excel. For example there may be a need to extract, first name from full name, extract user name from email, extract country code from phone etc. In such examples Left function is helpful. In this article we will discuss how to use Left function in Excel with the help of an example.

John has customer spend data for his company. He is looking foward to create updated Gender column. The new Gender column should have only first letter of the Gender i.e. M or F.

Extract one character from Left

• Step 1: The first parameter of Left function is “text”. “text” is the cell which contains Text value, from which we will extract letters from the left. For this example it is Gender i.e. cell F5. So we will be entering the same.

                  =LEFT(F5, )

• Step 2: The second parameter is how many characters we are looking to extract from the cell. Currently the requirement is to extract only one value from the cell, so we will add 1 in the syntax. After putting the value, press enter to get the results.

                  =LEFT(F5,1)

• Step 3: Copy the cell F5 and paste the formulas to rest of the cells in the column. This will generate updated Gender column for whole table.

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Please visit our video tutorial to go through the example as well:

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