Excel is well suited for textual data extraction. As the words natural meaning suggest, LEFT function extracts specified characters from left and RIGHT function from right.

Say we want to extract First Name from text Salman Salim Khan

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6

S

a

l

m

a

n

S

a

l

i

m

K

h

a

n

So, we need to extract 6 characters from left. So our function would be (as shown below)

Now we want to extract Surname from text Salman Salim Khan

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2

1

S

a

l

m

a

n

S

a

l

i

m

K

h

a

n

For extracting Surname, we nees 4 characters from right. So our expression would be

1. Space will also be counted as character
2. Even if extracted text is number, still it gets converted into text
3. On omitting how_many it is treated as 1 resulting to extraction of first (LEFT) / last (RIGHT) character
4. Writing negative number in how_many does not reverse functionality of respective functions. It will display error