The LEFT function in Microsoft Excel allows users to extract a substring (or a specific number of characters) from the beginning of a string of text. This is useful for situations where you need to extract certain information from a longer string of text.
For example, you can use the LEFT formula to extract the first name from a full name, or the first 3 characters from an SKU. This function is also useful for cleaning up data by removing unwanted characters from the beginning of a string. It requires two arguments, the string of text and the number of characters you want to extract. It returns the extracted characters as a string.