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This tutorial shows the methods on extract substring from left, middle or right of a cell, and also explain how to extract text before or after a specific character as below screenshots shown.
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Extract text string before, after or between characters without formula
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| Here is a tool - Extract Text in Kutools for Excel can help you quickly and easily extract strings before, after or between characters as you need. Click for 30-day free trial with 300 add-ins! |
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In Excel, there are some formulas can help you to quickly extract part of text.
Extract first n characters
Supposing you want to extract first 3 characters from a given list data, please select a blank cell that you want to place the extracted result, then use this formula
B3 is the cell you extract characters from, 3 is the number of characters you want to extract.
Press Enter key to get the extracted result. Then drag fill handle over the cells to apply this formula.
Extract last n characters
For example, extract last 6 characters from a list of string, please select a blank cell that you want to place the extracted result and use this formula:
B9 is the cell you extract characters from, 6 is the number of characters you want to extract.
Press Enter key to get the extracted result. Then drag fill handle over the cells to apply this formula.
Extract n characters form middle
If you want to extract 3 characters begin from the 4th character of a string, you can use below formula:
B15 is the cell you extract characters from, 4 represent extract characters from 4th character (count from left), 3 is the number of characters you want to extract.
Press Enter key to get the extracted result. Then drag fill handle over the cells to apply this formula.
Note:
If you want to move the extracted results to another location, please copy and paste the extracted results as value firstly.
If you want to extract substring after or before a specified character, you can apply one of below methods to handle the job.
Method A: Extract substring after or before a defined character by using formula
Supposing you want to extract characters after the character “-” from a list of strings, please use this formula:
B3 is the cell you want to extract characters from, - is the character you want to extract string after.
Press Enter key to get the extracted result. Then drag fill handle over the cells to apply this formula.
If you want to extract substring before a defined character, you can use the formula like this:
Example result is shown as below:
Note
The data may be lost or changed while you copy and paste the formula results to another location. For preventing this problem from happening, you can copy and paste the formula results as value after applying the formula. Or you can try the Method B.
Method B: Extract substring after or before a defined character by Kutools for Excel
For directly extract substring after or before a specified character, you can use the Extract Text utility of Kutools for Excel, which can help you to extract all characters after or before a character, also can extract specific length of characters before or after a character.
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Before using the Extract Text utility, please take 3 minutes to free install Kutools for Excel: Free Download Now!
1. Select the cells that you want to extract characters, click Kutools > Text > Extract Text.
2. In the popping Extract Text dialog, enter *: into Text textbox, then click Add to add this criterion to Extract list.
The wildcard * indicates any length of strings, ? indicate anyone character. In this case, *: represents to extract all characters (including colon mark :) before colon mark from selected cells.
3. Click Ok, a dialog pops out, select a cell to place the extracted text.
4. Click OK, then the substring in each which before colon mark (including colon mark) has been extracted at cell.
Tip
Maybe in some cases, you need to extract substring between two characters, you can choose one of below methods to handle the job.
Supposing to extract characters between brackets () from a given list, you can use below formula:
In the formula, B3 is the cell that you want to extract string from, ( and ) are the two characters you want to extract string between.
Press Enter key to get the extracted result. Then drag fill handle over the cells to apply this formula.
Note
If the formula is a little difficult for you, you can try the Method B, which is using a handy tool to quickly solve this problem.
Method B: Extract by Kutools for Excel
The Extract Text utility of Kutools for Excel also can do you a favor on this operation.
Before using the Extract Text utility, please take 3 minutes to free install Kutools for Excel: Free Download Now!
1. Select the cells that you want to extract substring between characters, click Kutools > Text > Extract Text.
2. In the Extract Text dialog, enter (*) to the Text textbox, click Add button to add this criterion to the Extract list.
The asterisk mark * indicates any length of string, if you want to extract specific length of character, you can use the question mark ? to indicate anyone character. Here, (*) represents to extract all characters between (), including ().
3. Click Ok to select a cell to place the extracted result, then click OK.
Now the substring between brackets has been extracted.
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If you want to extract e-mail address from a given string or a range of cells, you can use the Extract Email Address function to handle this job at once time instead of finding them one by one.
Before using the Extract Email Address utility, please take 3 minutes to free install Kutools for Excel: Free Download Now!
1. Select the cells that will be extracted email address, then click Kutools > Text > Extract Email Address.
2. Then a dialog pops out for you selecting a cell to output the address emails.
3. Click OK, the email addresses in each cell have been extracted.
If there is a list of data mixed numeric and alphabetical and special characters, you just want to extract the numbers or alphabetical values, you can try Kutools for Excel’s Remove Characters utility.
1. Before you using the Remove Characters utility, you need to have a copy of the data as below screenshot shown:
2. Then select this copy of data, click Kutools > Text > Remove Characters.
3. In the Remove Characters dialog, check Non-numeric option, click Ok.
Now only the numeric characters have been left.
To extract alphabetical values only, check Non-alpha option in the Remove Characters dialog.
Click to download this sample file
Extract time from datetime string
Provides tricks to extract time (hh:mm:ss) or hour/minute/second only from datetime string (mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss)
Extract rows that meet criteria
In this article, it can help you quickly extract these rows that meet criteria to another location in Excel except finding and copying them one by one.
Extract a nth character from string
Here will introduce the methods on extracting the nth character from a string, for example, extract the 3th character from string a1b2c3, the result is b.
Extract substring between two characters
Show the methods on extracting substring between two same or different characters.
