Text Functions in Excel: Concatenate, Left, Right and Mid Functions in Excel

String Manipulations in MS Excel facilitates its user to perform within string extraction. In this article you will learn about Text Functions in Excel that includes Concatenate, Left, Right and Mid Functions in Excel.

MS Excel provides an extensive support for string manipulations. This feature of MS Excel facilitates its user to perform within string extraction as well many other supportive functions that makes the work easier.

Concatenating/Joining Strings

Joining or concatenating text in MS Excel is an excellent feature that is quite extensively used specially in case of joining First Name and Last Name to generate a Full Name. MS Excel provides two methods to join the text. One is, through =Concatenate() function and the other is a bit direct (more like a programmer style of joining strings). In this tutorial you will observe the application of both methods.

Using Concatenate () Function

Concatenate function allows the user to join multiple cells and inserting custom values. In the following example, you will observe that the formula used joins values from Cell A2 and Cell B2 however, it also adds a <space> character in between the both values.

Using a Direct Method

The direct method, doesn’t involve Concatenate function however, it produces the similar results.

Left

Left function allows user to select a specific number of characters from the left side of a string. In the following example given below, you will observe that the function has two inputs, one is the text and the other is the length of output text.

The above function selected Cell A2 and set the output requirement for 4 characters.

Using the fill function to apply the formula to all cells.

Right

Right function allows user to select a specific number of characters from the Right side of a string. In the following example given below, you will observe that the function has two inputs, one is the text and the other is the length of output text.

The above function selected Cell A2 and set the output requirement for 4 characters.

Using the fill function to apply the formula to all cells.

Mid

Mid function allows user to select a specific number of characters from within the specific string starting from a specific point. In the following example given below, you will observe that the function has three inputs, one is the text, other is the starting point and the last is the length of output text.

The above function selected Cell A2, started selecting the text from point 5 and set the output requirement for 6 characters.

Using the fill function to apply the formula to all cells.