The MID Excel function is designed to extract a substring from the middle of any given text string.
The MID function is classified as an Excel text function which returns a specific number of characters beginning at a position of our choosing.
Figure 1. of MID Function in Excel
Generic Formula
=MID(text,start_num,num_chars)
- text = The original text string to extract from
- start_num = The exact position of the initial character to extract
- num_chars = The amount of characters to be extracted
How to Use the Excel Mid Function
Using the following simple steps will help us extract text with the MID function Excel;
- We must first collect and arrange our text strings for extraction in our worksheet:
Figure 2. of Text Strings for Extraction in Excel
Be sure to leave a bank column of cells for the MID formula to return our text results (see column D above).
Our goal here is to extract a specific number of text characters from the text strings in column A.
- The Excel MID formula we will insert into cell D2 of our spreadsheet example is as follows:
=MID(A2,B2,C2)
Figure 3. of MID Function in Excel
The MID formula extracted the word “unexpected” (10 characters) from a given position in our original text string.
- Modify and copy the MID Excel function in cell D2 above, down into the other cells in the column for similar results:
Figure 4. MID Function in Excel
Note
- The MID function will always return a text string of characters, even if our extracted substring contains digits only.
- If our start_num value is more than the length of our original text string , then the Excel Mid formula will return an empty string value (“”).
- If our start_num value is lower than 1, the Excel Mid formula will return an error #VALUE!
- If our num_chars value is below 0 ( a negative number), the Excel Mid formula will return the error #VALUE!
- If our num_chars value is 0, the Excel Mid formula will return an empty text string (blank cell).
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