How to get first characters or numbers from the value

In Excel there is a simple function LEFT, which is used to get first characters of value or to remove unwanted characters from the right side.

Example

In this Excel table are ID composed of year and item number. We want to take the year from the ID value to another column.

The year in ID contains always 4 numbers. So we can use Excel function LEFT.

Formula

=LEFT(A2,4)

Result

Note: If you need more, try this article: https://excel-example.com/other-tutorial/how-to-split-the-value