Skip to content
Free Excel Tutorials
  • Home
  • Excel For Beginners
  • Excel Intermediate
  • Advanced Excel For Experts

Data Analysis

  • Conditional Formatting Data bars Examples in Excel
  • Remove Duplicates Example in Excel
  • How To Load Analysis ToolPak in Excel
  • Randomize/ Shuffle List in Excel
  • How to count table columns in Excel

References

  • How to reference named range different sheet in Excel
  • Create hyperlink with VLOOKUP in Excel
  • How to get last row in mixed data with blanks in Excel
  • Get nth match with INDEX / MATCH in Excel
  • Count unique text values with criteria

Data Validations

  • Excel Data validation must begin with
  • Excel Data validation must contain specific text
  • Excel Data validation only dates between
  • Excel Data validation no punctuation
  • Data validation must not exist in list

Remove last characters from right in a cell in Excel

by

To remove the last n characters from a text string, you can use a formula based on the LEFT and LEN functions. You can use a formula like this to strip the last 3 characters, last 5 characters of a value, starting on the left.

Formula

=LEFT(text,LEN(text)-n)

Note: there is no reason to use the VALUE function if you don’t need a numeric result.

Explanation

In the example shown, the formula in E6 is:

=VALUE(LEFT(D6,LEN(D6)-6))

Which trims ” miles” from each value returning just the number.

Worked Example:   How to count specific words in a range in Excel

How this formula works

The LEFT function is perfect for extracting characters from the left side of a value. We use LEFT in this formula to extract all characters up to the number of characters we want to trim.

The challenge, for values with variable length, is that we don’t know exactly how many characters to extract. That’s where the LEN function is used.

Worked Example:   How to extract word containing specific text in Excel

Working from the inside out, LEN calculates the total length of each value. For D6 (736 miles) the total length is 9.

To get the number of characters to extract, we subtract 6, which the length of ” miles” including the space character. The result is 3, which is fed to LEFT as the number of characters to extract. LEFT then returns the text “736” as a text value.

Worked Example:   Highlight blank cells in Excel

Finally, because we want a numeric value (not text) we run the text through the VALUE function, which converts numbers in text format to plain numbers.

The formula evaluation goes like this:

=VALUE(LEFT(D6,LEN(D6)-6))
=VALUE(LEFT(D6,9-6))
=VALUE(LEFT(D6,3))
=VALUE("736")
=736

Post navigation

Previous Post:

Normalize text by removing punctuations, extra spaces and more in Excel

Next Post:

Remove first character in a cell in Excel

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Learn Basic Excel

Ribbon
Workbook
Worksheets
Format Cells
Find & Select
Sort & Filter
Templates
Print
Share
Protect
Keyboard Shortcuts

Categories

  • Charts
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Validation
  • Excel Functions
    • Cube Functions
    • Database Functions
    • Date and Time Functions
    • Engineering Functions
    • Financial Functions
    • Information Functions
    • Logical Functions
    • Lookup and Reference Functions
    • Math and Trig Functions
    • Statistical Functions
    • Text Functions
    • Web Functions
  • Excel VBA
  • Excel Video Tutorials
  • Formatting
  • Grouping
  • Others

Logical Functions

  • AND function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • IFNA function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • NOT function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • IF function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • XOR function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation

Date Time

  • EDATE function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • NETWORKDAYS function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • Calculate number of hours between two times in Excel
  • Get day name from date in Excel
  • Get days, hours, and minutes between dates in Excel

Grouping

  • How to randomly assign people to groups in Excel
  • Running count group by n size in Excel
  • Map text to numbers in Excel
  • How to randomly assign data to groups in Excel
  • Calculate conditional mode with criteria in Excel

General

  • Select, Insert, Rename, Move, Delete Worksheets in Excel
  • Using Existing Templates in Excel
  • How to increase by percentage in Excel
  • How to fill cell ranges with random text values in Excel
  • How to generate random number between two numbers in Excel
© 2023 xlsoffice . All Right Reserved. | Teal Smiles | Abbreviations And Their Meaning