Cut that out! Using LEFT to Extract Data from Text Strings.

Ever talk to someone and they're just giving you too much information?

We'll let's say you have a list of emails in the format of firstName.lastName@website.com and you just want a list of First Names.

Our approach will be to find the Period (.) and extract the Left part of the original email until that point.

So first, lets figure out where our periods are. We'll use the Search formula as follows:

=SEARCH(whatToSearchFor,whereToSearch)

So, in our case, we're looking for the period in the A column:

=SEARCH(".",A2)

Next, we'll use the Left formula to extract up until the period. Our formula will be:

=LEFT(OriginalText,NumberOfCharacters)

So in our case, we're looking to get up until the period. As we don't want the period itself, we'll minus 1 from the Period Position to get everything before the period.

=LEFT(A2,B2-1)

And there you have it:

Now you know how to use the Left formula! Maybe that will help with getting Left .... on Read! 🤭