Extracting characters from a cell based on their position is a common task. Typically, the specific text segments one needs to extract
- are located either at the start or the end of a cell,
- or they involve a sequence of characters starting from a particular position.
As an example here, you might want to extract characters from the first to the third, or capture all characters from the 13th position to the end of the text.
In the following explanation, I will provide a detailed guide on how to address such challenges. They will involve Excel formulas, procedures and !SEMTools solutions.
Extract characters by their position at the beginning of the cell
This topic is quite interesting and that is why I have dedicated a separate article to it which you can see here: Extract the first N characters of an Excel cell.
подпись: Take the first 11 characters at the position at the beginning of the cell to extract from them phone numbers
Extract characters by their position at the end of the cell
I’ve also devoted a separate article to this topic, because you can extract the characters at the end not just by their number, but also by various conditions. See details here: extract the last N characters from Excel cells.
Take N characters by their position in the middle of the cell
This is the situation when you know what position a character takes in the string and how many characters should be taken from that position. The best way to solve this problem is to use the MID function, read the corresponding article at the link.
Actually, getting characters from Nth position is equivalent to deleting (N-1) characters before it. Here we get full names of the routes which start at 13 character, by deleting 12 first:
