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=LEFT()
Extracting a given number of characters from a cells, counting from left
Sometimes you want to extract
and use a portion of the contents of a cell, either number
or text.
Let me give you an example. Say you have entered birth
dates in the following format "yyyy-mm-dd", 2004-03-13. It
is quite difficult to extract the year of birth here,
especially if you have 13 000 of them...
This is where the magic of =LEFT() comes
in...
Go to cell A1 and enter "Date of birth" --
without the "-s. Enter these numbers in the cells below:
Go to cell B1 and enter "Year of birth".
As you now can see, the cells A1 and
B1 both act as column headings -- they
describe what kind of data you expect to find below.
Go to cell B2 and type
=LEFT(A2;4) and hit
[Enter].
By the way: instead of typing A2 above,
you can of course use your mouse and click inside cell
A2 after you’ve typed
=LEFT(
Copy down the cells from B2 to the cells
B3 and B4. Do this by
selecting cell B2 and grab the handle in
the lower right corner of the cell and drag it down until
you’ve covered B4.
What happened? Your cell B2 should now
read "2002", correct?
Let’s look a bit closer at what happened here...
What happens is that you instruct Calc to
get the 4 first characters (in this case numbers) in cell
A2 from left.