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How to extract text and numbers in Excel

Ultimate Suite for Excel contains a tool that allows extracting text, substrings, and numbers from one cell to another cell in your Excel worksheet. Forget about complex formulas with the FIND, MIN, LEFT, or RIGHT functions. Extract Text is a perfect alternative that offers you several radio buttons for when you want to extract text or numbers.

Before you start

We care about your data. The add-in will back up your file if you select the corresponding option.

How to extract substrings and numbers in Excel

Click the Extract icon that you'll find in the Text group on the Ablebits Data tab:
Extract tool for Excel.

You'll see the Extract Text pane:

How to extract Excel substring.

  1. Select the column with values where you want to extract text or numbers.
    Note. The column with the extracted substrings will be inserted to the right of the initially selected column. For example, if you extract characters or substrings from column A, the result will be placed to a new column B.
  2. If needed, click the Expand selection icon to highlight the whole table.
  3. Tick The first N characters to enter the number of characters to extract from the beginning of the selected cells.
  4. Select The last N characters and specify the number of characters to extract at the end of your cell values.
  5. You can Extract text by position. Enter the necessary Position number of the first character and The number of characters to extract.

    For example, you've got a 'ABC123DE' string and need to extract '123'. In this case, Position number of the first character will be '4' and The number of characters to extract will be '3'.

  6. All before text. Type the text that has the substring to extract in front of it.
  7. All after text. Specify the text that has the substring to extract behind.
  8. You can Extract text between value 1 and value 2. For this, enter both values into the corresponding boxes. If you check off the Including delimiters option, the text will be extracted together with the values you entered. If you do not check it, the values will not be included. If the text case matters, make sure to check the Case-sensitive box.

  9. Choose Extract numbers to pull all numbers from the selected cells.
  10. Tick the Insert as formula checkbox to recalculate the resulting numbers if the source data changes.
  11. To make sure your data is safe, check the option to Back up the worksheet.

Click  Insert results to see the extracted records in a new column inserted to the right of your source column.