Extract bold text from cells in Excel

Sometimes, when copying text from external sources, you may only need to extract the words that are in bold. Excel’s standard functions don’t provide a way to filter or extract text based on font style.

!SEMTools for Excel includes a ready-to-use tool for extracting bold characters directly from your worksheets — no coding required. You can find this feature in the Extract Symbols menu.

Example: Extracting Bold Text with VBA

If you don’t have !SEMTools installed, you can use VBA UDF that loops through the characters in a cell and collects only the bold text:

Function ExtractBoldText(rng As Range) As String
    Dim i As Long
    For i = 1 To Len(rng.Value)
        If rng.Characters(i, 1).Font.Bold Then
            ExtractBoldText = ExtractBoldText & Mid(rng.Value, i, 1)
        End If
    Next i
End Function

Summing Values in Bold Cells

You may also need to sum only the numbers that are formatted in bold. Excel doesn’t offer a built-in filter for font weight, but VBA can help by looping through a range and summing only cells with bold formatting. If you use !SEMTools, the same result can be achieved instantly without writing any code.

This post is also available in RU.