Excel: partial string - how to get the number you want

In Excel you have several functions to choose from to help you evaluate the contents of your tables. If you only want to output a part from a text, you have two functions available. With the PART function, for example, you get a certain number of characters.

How to get a substring in Excel

The spreadsheet program from Microsoft offers several ways to analyze and edit the contents of your table. Even if you only want to output a part of a text, there is a suitable function. But there are some points to consider.

1. The PART function returns a certain number of characters of the text, depending on the number specified. Thereby you can specify a position within the text from which to count.
2. With the TEILB function, on the other hand, you can specify the bytes that describe a number of characters.
3. Independently of the specified default language, each character is counted as 1. For this, you must write "=TEIL(Text;First_character;Number_of_characters)". So if you enter 5 for "Number_characters", you will be output exactly five characters starting from the specified position.
4. If the language used supports a double-byte character set, such as Japanese, Chinese and Korean, then a corresponding character counts as two.
5. Note that the number for the first character must not be larger than the existing characters in the text. If this is the case, an empty text will be returned.