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How to find position of first/last number in a text string in Excel?

For example, you have a list of text string which is a mixture of letters and numbers. If you want to find the position of the first or last number in each string, what would you do? Actually, using formula will help you quickly find the position of first/last number in a specified text string. In this tutorial, we will show you the details of dealing with this problem.

Find position of first number in text string in Excel
Find position of last number in text string in Excel

Find position of first number in text string in Excel

As the below screenshot shown, for finding positions of first numbers in the text strings, please do as follows.

1. Select the cell B2, copy and paste one of the below formula into the Formula Bar:

1). Formula 1: =MIN(SEARCH({0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9},A2&"0123456789"));

2). Formula 2: =MATCH(TRUE,ABS(CODE(MID(A2,ROW($A$1:INDEX(A:A,LEN(A2))),1))-52.5)<5,0) + Ctrl + Shift + Enter;

3). Formula 3: =MIN(IF(ISERROR(FIND({1;2;3;4;5;6;7;8;9;0},A2)),"",FIND({1;2;3;4;5;6;7;8;9;0},A2))).

2. Then the first number position of the first string is displaying in the cell B2. Now drag the Fill Handle down to cell B7 to fill the below range.

Then all first number positions of the whole strings are listed out.

Find position of last number in text string in Excel

After finding the position of first number, we now start finding the position of last number in strings.

In this section, there are two formulas for you.

Formula 1: =MAX(IF(ISNUMBER(VALUE(MID(A2,ROW(INDIRECT("1:" & LEN(A2))),1))),ROW(INDIRECT("1:" & LEN(A2))))) + Ctrl + Shift + Enter;

Formula 2: =MAX(IFERROR(FIND({1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0},A2,ROW(INDIRECT("1:"&LEN(A2)))),0)) + Ctrl + Shift + Enter

1. Select cell B2, copy and paste one of the above formulas into the Formula Bar, then press Ctrl + Shift + Enter keys simultaneously. Then you can see the result displays in B2.

2. Select the B2, drag the Fill Handle down to cell B7 to auto fill the range.

Then you will get positions of all last numbers of the whole text string immediately.

Easily separate text and number from one cell into two columns in Excel:

With Kutools for Excel’s Split Cells utility, you can split a range of cells into rows or columns by specific separator, split text and numbers or split text by certian length. Download and try it now! (30-day free trail)

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Comments (15)
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Jon Adams
Jon Adams
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The function 1). Formula 1: =MIN(SEARCH({0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9},A2&"0123456789")); It's absolutely what i needed and extremely cool! Thanks so much! Jon
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Wajid
Wajid     Jon Adams
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Hats off mate..
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Ashabel
Ashabel
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This was exactly what I wanted. Thank you.
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George
George
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And here is a formula for finding the position of the last numeric character in a string, but WITHOUT using an array formula: =MAX(SEARCH(CHAR(9),SUBSTITUTE("0123456789"&A1,{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9},CHAR(9),LEN(A1)+10-LEN(SUBSTITUTE("0123456789"&A1,{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9},"")))))-10 The number 10 appearing in this formula, are due to the length of the constant string "0123456789", that is concatenated in this formula.
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Datta
Datta     George
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Hi George, your formula is may meet my requirement. I need similar formula to find out digit position in the string listed in "A" row in B row Required output 8 5 1 4 3 1 3 2 5 5 6 6 1 7 9 9 1 1 6 0 9 3 0 2 7 4 9 3 6 5 5 7 4 9 8 10 2 10 0 8 1 9
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Mehidy Hassan
Mehidy Hassan     George
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Many Thanks , Great
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LanaMadAboutExcel
LanaMadAboutExcel
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.... and here I thought that I knew Excel well. Bravo!!!!!
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Francis
Francis
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how to get this to work in powerpivot
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crystal
crystal     Francis
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Hi,
Sorry can't help with this.
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Guess
Guess
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That's what I needed =MIN(SEARCH({0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9},A2&"0123456789"));

thank you very much!
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crystal
crystal     Guess
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You are welcome O(∩_∩)O
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Borja
Borja
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goood, thanks
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Chris
Chris
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Thought I would let everyone know that I needed to find the last position of the house numbers in an address field in access. The only way I could do this was to export a short query to excel and run this formula. I know there is a way to get the excel functions in access but this was much easier. I had addresses that had varying house number lengths and then you throw in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd...St., Ave into the mix within the street name and you got a major problem parsing a very bad formatted address string.

address examples 1234 nw (or NW) 4th St.
12 West St North (or N)
123,456, and 789 Heritage Circle (or Crc)
123 & 456 N 1st. St

I figured out a way to parse off the first and second example real quick with some research (I would give credit, but right now I can't remember where I got the answer). It involved creating a VBA function to accomplish it. That worked great but I came to a problem when we come to the first "," or "and" or "&".

Using this formula in excel found the last number I needed without choosing the street number. Since most house numbers ended with a space " " between them and the direction segment or the street name segment, I added --- &" " after the find formula. Like this: in an array formula
=MAX(IFERROR(FIND({1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0}&" ",E2,ROW(INDIRECT("1:"&LEN(E2)))),0))
A quick export back to an access table and wala! you have the number.
202 & 206 N Blanche Ave = 9

Now I know I could probably parse the rest of the address in excel but it actually worked real well in Access, so I just decided to do the rest there.

If there is a way to do it all in Access, I couldn't find it or figure it out.
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Wolfgang
Wolfgang
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Ich habe gerade diese Lösung ausprobiert und es klappt bei mir nicht. Hat sich inzwischen etwas, was die Matrixformel betrifft, geändert?
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crystal
crystal     Wolfgang
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Hi Wolfgang,

The formulas provided in this post work well in my case. What result did you get?
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