Hello Excellers and welcome back to another #FormulaFriday #Excel tip in my 2019 series. So, today let’s tackle an Excel question asked by a subscriber to my Monthly Newsletter. They needed to check if the first 5 characters of their data in Column A matched the first 5 characters if their data in Column B. They had two lists of serial numbers where only the first 5 characters were required to match. A sample of the Excel data set can be seen below.
The LEFT Function.
So, we can use the LEFT Function to solve this question. The LEFT function extracts a given number of characters from the left side of a supplied string. First, let’s look at the syntax of the function.
Syntax =LEFT (text, [num_chars]) where
- text – This is the text from which to extract characters.
- num_chars – [optional] This is an optional argument. It is the number of characters to extract, starting on the left side of the text. The default is 1 if this is left blank.
In this example, we test the first 5 characters in Column A vs Column B. The formula is as below
=LEFT(A2,5)=LEFT(B2,5)
Subsequently, using the comparison of = will return a TRUE or FALSE result whether the cells match, and in this case using LEFT if the first 5 characters match.
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