When working with data, you often need to select only those entries that meet a specific condition. The data can be very different – entire cell values or just fragments of them such as words or characters.
Sometimes, you don’t even need the data itself but rather some of its attributes. Depending on the object – the cell, its value, or the words and characters inside that value – Excel provides different properties that you can use as criteria.
This page will guide you to the right article depending on your task.
In addition, EXTRACT is also a section of my !SEMTools add-in for Excel, which allows you to select and extract data by multiple criteria, as well as find, remove, and transform it.
Extract Characters
Learn how to extract characters from cell ranges based on many of their properties.
Extract Words
MS Excel does not have any built-in understanding of words. For people, however, words are one of the most important structural units of text. !SEMTools provides a set of tools for extracting words from cells.
Extract Phrases
The situation with phrases is similar to words. You can extract standard phrases, place names (with or without prepositions), or even your own custom lists of phrases.
Extract Cells
This section covers procedures for filtering cells based on their values. In !SEMTools, the “Extract Cells” menu works as follows: the contents of the cells remain unchanged, but only the cells that meet the specified criteria remain in the range. Cells that do not meet the criteria are cleared. These operations are similar to word extractions, except the comparison is made against the entire cell value.
Extract Attributes
Sometimes you need to extract completely new information from the data you already have. Attributes can belong to the cell itself, its font, or the text inside. All of them can be used as selection criteria.
- Cell attributes: width, height, fill color, border presence and color.
- Font attributes: font name (Arial, Verdana, etc.), size, style (bold, italic, underlined), color.
- Text attributes: text length in pixels, number of characters, number of words.
Count
The articles in this section describe how to extract statistical information about the content of text cells, such as:
- share of a total (for numeric values);
- cumulative percentage;
- frequency of an element in a selected range;
- position of an element by its occurrence.
- ABC-analysis
Need to extract or analyze text in Excel? Install the !SEMTools add-in and get powerful tools for text and data processing with a single click!