Slice & join text — Excel guide
Pulling text apart and putting it together: fixed-position slices, delimiter hunting, and joining lists back up.
LEFT
The first N characters (RIGHT takes the last N).
- Slices always return TEXT — "021" won't sum or match the number 21. Wrap in VALUE() to convert back.
- Drop a suffix: LEFT(A2, LEN(A2) - 3).
- On Excel 365, TEXTBEFORE/TEXTAFTER replace the FIND arithmetic entirely.
MID
N characters starting at any position.
- Asking past the end is safe — MID(text, start, 999) is the 'rest of the string' idiom.
- Everything after a delimiter: MID(A2, FIND("@", A2) + 1, 99).
- LEN counts every character including spaces — the fastest trailing-space detector.
TEXTJOIN
Join a whole range with a delimiter between entries.
- The & operator is inline concat for a few pieces: =A2 & " " & B2.
- Joining a date? & shows the raw serial — wrap it: TEXT(B2, "mmm d").