Remove characters from left

Remove characters from left

Generic formula 

=RIGHT(B5,LEN(B5)-N)

Related formulas 

Remove characters from right

Split text and numbers

Split numbers from units of measure

Explanation

To strip characters from the left, you can use a formula based on the RIGHT and LEN functions. In the example shown, the formula in C5 is:

=RIGHT(B5,LEN(B5)-C5)

How this formula works

It may seem counterintuitive that we are using the RIGHT function to strip characters from the left, but there is method to the madness.

Essentially, this formula extracts characters from the right up to, but not including, the characters being removed from the left. The general form of the formula is:

=RIGHT(text,LEN(text)-N)

where N is the number of characters to remove.

In the example B5 contains 123456 which goes into RIGHT as text, the number of characters to extract is calculated with the LEN function like this:

LEN(B5)-C5

B5 contains 6 characters, so LEN returns 6 and formula becomes:

=RIGHT(123456,5)

and returns a final result of "23456".

Getting a numeric value

RIGHT always returns text, even when the input is numeric. If you need a numeric result, you can get Excel to coerce the text to numbers by adding zero like this:

=RIGHT(B5,LEN(B5)-C5)+0

Note this only works when the value returned by RIGHT returns only numbers.

Remove characters from left

Generic formula 

=RIGHT(B5,LEN(B5)-N)

Related formulas 

Remove characters from right

Split text and numbers

Split numbers from units of measure

Explanation

To strip characters from the left, you can use a formula based on the RIGHT and LEN functions. In the example shown, the formula in C5 is:

=RIGHT(B5,LEN(B5)-C5)

How this formula works

It may seem counterintuitive that we are using the RIGHT function to strip characters from the left, but there is method to the madness.

Essentially, this formula extracts characters from the right up to, but not including, the characters being removed from the left. The general form of the formula is:

=RIGHT(text,LEN(text)-N)

where N is the number of characters to remove.

In the example B5 contains 123456 which goes into RIGHT as text, the number of characters to extract is calculated with the LEN function like this:

LEN(B5)-C5

B5 contains 6 characters, so LEN returns 6 and formula becomes:

=RIGHT(123456,5)

and returns a final result of "23456".

Getting a numeric value

RIGHT always returns text, even when the input is numeric. If you need a numeric result, you can get Excel to coerce the text to numbers by adding zero like this:

=RIGHT(B5,LEN(B5)-C5)+0

Note this only works when the value returned by RIGHT returns only numbers.