3 Ways To Truncate Text In Excel

Note that this cell must be different than the cell in which your target text appears.

=LEFT(A3, 6) displays the first six characters in cell A3. If the text in A3 says “Cats are better”, the truncated text will read “Cats a” in your selected cell. =RIGHT(B2, 5) displays the last 5 characters in cell B2. If the text in B2 says “I love wikiHow”, the truncated text will read “kiHow” in your selected cell. Keep in mind that spaces count as characters.

If you haven’t already added your data to Excel, you’ll need to do so first.

=MID(A1, 3, 3) displays three characters from cell A1, the first of which is the third character from the left in the text. If A1’s text says “racecar”, the truncated text will read “cec” in your selected cell. Similarly, =MID(B3, 4, 8) displays eight characters from cell B3, starting with the fourth character from the left. If B3’s text says “bananas aren’t people”, the truncated text will read “anas are” in your selected cell.

This function divides the cell’s contents of one Excel cell into separate columns.