Today I came across a problem I see at least once or twice a week. I wanted to perform some analysis using an employee number. The output from one of my systems included the employee number with GLK_RDT at the beginning of the number. Since I needed the numbers alone, I needed to remove the annoying 7 character text string at the beginning of them.

 This can be accomplished by using the Excel functions Left() and Right(). In my case I only needed right(). the syntax of the right function is =RIGHT(text, number of characters). Since I wanted to remove the first 7 characters of the string, my formula was =right(A1, 6), where six is the number of digits of the employee number. If I had varying lengths of employee number, I would use =right(A1,Len(A1)-7), where 7 is the number of characters I want to remove from the front.

The Left function can be used in much the same way.

Jospeh Harris
Excel Help
More Excel Help

Bookmark It

Related posts:

1. Removing Characters from a String in Excel It is often necessary to replace characters within a string...
2. Remove the ‘ Apostrophe from Excel Cells Many applications that export to Excel, export the data with...
3. Removing #N/A error in Excel using ISNA() The #N/A error happens most often when a lookup function...