Use the FIND, MID, LEFT, and RIGHT functions

- [Instructor] Excel has a number of functions…that fall under the heading, text.…If you go to the Formulas tab on the Ribbon,…you'll see Text and lots of options here.…A few more common ones are left and right,…where we can pull data out of the left side…of a cell, right side of a cell.…For example, in column A here, we've got some item numbers.…Maybe these are set up on a positional basis.…Maybe it's the three leftmost characters…that refer to the actual location where the item was made,…maybe that's something to do with the size,…or the color or the price, something like that.…

Let's pull out data from the left side of these.…Now, in some of the examples that we're going to be seeing,…a faster and perhaps better approach…could be the use of the Flash Fill feature.…But let's show how we can first use the left function.…We're about to pull out data…from the left side of this cell.…Here's the location and we want…to pull off three characters.…Type it this way, press Ctrl + Enter,…we see what's happening.…Double-click to copy down the column.…