The LEFT function is used to extract a specific number of characters from the start of a cell.
This can be useful to when needing to remove unwanted characters in a cell that appear on the right of the cells content. This can happen as a result of importing data into Excel from another application or database.
The syntax for the LEFT function is:
=LEFT(text, [num_chars])
| Argument | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Text | The data containing the characters you want to extract |
| Num_chars | The number of characters you want to extractIf omitted, it extracts only the first character |
The example below shows the LEFT function being used to extract the first 2 characters from the content of cell A1.
