LEFT function in Excel extracts a certain number of characters from the beginning of a text string. The syntax for the LEFT function is: =LEFT(text, [num_chars]) where text is the text string from which you want to extract characters, and [num_chars] is the number of characters you want to extract.
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.
=LEFT(text, [num_chars])
text is the text string from which you want to extract characters,
[num_chars] is the number of characters you want to extract.
In the picture above we can see that the function is used to retrieve the country codes from the phone number. Number 5 identifies how many characters we want to extract.
Here you can see that the function returned 5 characters from the left side of the cell. In our example, we can see that function returned the country code from all phone numbers. You can use this function to extract different characters.
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