When writing content on various text editors, making and doing errors is usually inevitable. We happen to make errors in all aspects of life. Errors to some extent prove we are human because no one is perfect in the universe.
In excel sheets errors can also be encountered in the rows, columns, and even the cells. Because makings these errors are to some extent inevitable, excel has this functionality to rectify such errors like exceeding the length of characters and values.
The use of automatic error detection and correction has proven to be effective and accurate over manual detection and correction. The automatic error detection and correction method use the built-in formulas in excel sheets. Doing the error correction manually may lead to numerous errors than the already exceeding ones.
To rectify the error of exceeding characters in an excel sheet, there are a couple of steps we follow which will include the following.
Method 1: Using the Right() Function
Step 1
On a new excel sheet on your computer, record some numeric values in the columns. Make sure the values are of four characters and above. You can use the excel sheet sample below as your reference.
Let's remove the first 4 characters from the data below using the Right Function
Step 2
Using the excel sheet above as our example, we need to remove the first four characters from each product in this step. To do this, we use the =RIGHT function. Unlike the =LEFT function that does removing the last characters, the =RIGHT function does the opposite.
To use the function, we write it in the formula as shown; =RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-4). This formula will omit the first four characters in cell A1.
We use RIGHT to remove the first characters in any given data set, LEN to describe the length of values in the data set, and -4 to omit or to remove the four characters.
Hold and drag the first cell to remove the first four characters of the remaining cells
After applying the formula well which we write on the formula bar, the results we obtain will be less than the first four characters. This is to prove the formula is effective in removing the first four characters of any data in the excel sheets.
Remove first 4 characters using the Replace function
Here is the syntax for replacing characters. =REPLACE(Text, 1, N, "")
Text: The string or numbers where you want to replace characters.
1: this is the Starting number of the text about to be replaced. (You can customize it according to your data)
N: The last number of the characters you wish to remove. In our case, the last character is 4 because we are removing four characters.
"": Replaces the characters you have selected with nothing
Example using Replace function()
1. Let's remove the first four characters from the data below
2. Type the following formula on cell b1 and click okay to remove the first 4 characters
=REPLACE(A1,1,4,"")
3. Hold drag and drop the formula to the remaining cells. The first four characters will be removed automatically
