As long as there’s something in the string that identifies the start of the substring, you can use the Find function with the Mid function to accomplish the mission. Use Find to generate the start point for the Mid function callHere’s a simple example to demonstrate how this works.

For example, 01/01/1980 is represented by the number 29221, so applying the Mid function to a cell containing the date 01/01/1980 (and requesting that 2 characters, starting from the 2nd character) would result in a returned value of “92”. Use the Day, Month or Year functions to extract individual parts of a date.

The Excel MID function extracts a given number of characters from the middle of a supplied text string. For example, =MID(“apple”,2,3) returns “ppl”….Excel MID Function

1. text – The text to extract from.
2. start_num – The location of the first character to extract.
3. num_chars – The number of characters to extract.

MID function

1. First, put the reference of the cell.
2. Second, indicate the position where you want to start the extraction (in our example, the position 9)
3. Third, indicate the number of characters you want to extract (8 characters to return)

The Excel RIGHT function extracts a given number of characters from the right side of a supplied text string. For example, RIGHT(“apple”,3) returns “ple”. The Excel MID function extracts a given number of characters from the middle of a supplied text string. For example, =MID(“apple”,2,3) returns “ppl”.

The MID function is categorized under TEXT functions. The function will return a specified number of characters from the middle of a given text string. While doing financial analysis, the MID function can be useful if we wish to extract characters from the middle of a specific text.

When we gave a number, MID extracted the character according to the arguments given above. Assume we extracted the first and last name of candidates separated by space. If we want, we can extract the first name using MID with the SEARCH function. We are given the data below: We will get the results below:

Just as an example, quoting Excel Formulas and Functions for Dummies, mastering functions such as LEFT, RIGHT and MID “gives you the power to literally break text apart.” Does this sound useful? Then let’s start by understanding…