Extracting a given number of characters from a cells, counting from right

Sometimes you want to extract and use a portion of the contents of a cell, either number or text. Just like you can use =LEFT() to extract characters from the left, you can use =RIGHT() to extract characters from the right.  Go to cell A1 and enter "Date of birth". Enter these numbers in the cells as shown. Go to cell B1 and enter "Day of birth". As you now can see, the cells A1 and B1 both act as column headings -- they describe what kind of data you expect to find below. Go to cell B2 and type =RIGHT(A2;2) and hit [Enter]. By the way: instead of typing A2 above, you can of course use your mouse and click inside cell A2 after you’ve typed =RIGHT( Copy down the cells from B2 to the cells B3 and B4. Do this by selecting cell B2 and grab the handle in the lower right corner of the cell and drag it down until you’ve covered B4. What happened? Your cell B2 should now read "12", correct? Let’s look a bit closer at what happened here... What happens is that you instruct Calc to get the 2 last characters (in this case numbers) in cell A2 from right.

=MID()

Extracting a given number characters, counting from the point you specify

The formulas =LEFT() and =RIGHT() are excellent if you want to extract the values from either the first character from the left or the right side. But what if you want to extract the value in the middle of a string -- say character 3 through 6 of a total of 14 characters? It could actually be done with =LEFT() and =RIGHT() in conjunction with =LEN(), but that would be a little complex, esp. as long as we have the excellent formula =MID(), which we will show you here. In cell A1 enter the following text: [This is a test of =MID()] In cell A3 enter the following, like shown above: [=MID(A1;6;2)] What happens when you press [Enter]? You get the word [is], right? In cell A4 enter the following, like shown above: [=MID(A1;10;5)] What happens when you press [Enter]? You get the word [ test], right? This illustrates one of the dangers, if you can call it that, when dealing with text -- it appears to say "test", but it says " test" -- do you see the difference? There’s an extra space before the word "test", which to Calc is a completely different word than " test"! OK, move on to some more explanations regarding the syntax... Look at the syntax: [=MID(A1;10;5)] Doesn’t this look quite similar to the =LEFT() and =RIGHT() syntaxes? There is in fact just one difference, and that is the middle part, which says from which character you want to start the extracts. A1 specifies that the text you want to extract is contained in the cell A1. You might just as well have replaced A1 with the text "This is a test of =MID()", encapsulated by the "-s at the beginning and end of the text. This is the same as the first parameter in the =LEFT()and =RIGHT() syntaxes. 10 specifies at which character you want to start the extract. This is the parameter that comes in additions to the two parameters in the =LEFT() and =RIGHT() syntaxes. 5 specifies the number of characters you want to extract, which is exactly the same as the last parameter in the =LEFT() and=RIGHT() syntaxes. That’s it! You can now extract values from a string.

=RAND()