Excel: How to Extract Text After nth Character

You can use the following syntax to extract the text after the nth character in a cell in Excel:

=MID(A2, 3+1, LEN(A2))

This particular formula extracts the text after the 3rd character in cell A2.

The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.

Example: Extract Text After nth Character in Excel

Suppose we have the following list of basketball team names in Excel:

Suppose we would like to extract all of the text after the third character from each cell in column A.

We can type the following formula into cell B2 to do so:

=MID(A2, 3+1, LEN(A2))

We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B:

Excel extract text after nth character

Column B now contains all of the text in column A after the third character.

To extract the text after a different character, simply change the 3 in the formula to a different number.

For example, you could instead use the following formula to extract all of the text after the 4th character:

=MID(A2, 4+1, LEN(A2))

The following screenshot shows how to use this formula in practice:

Column B now contains all of the text in column A after the fourth character.

Recall the formula we used to extract all of the text after the third character from cell A2:

=MID(A2, 3+1, LEN(A2))

This function uses the MID function, which extracts the text from a specific cell using a starting position and ending position.

In this example, we specify that we would like to extract the text from cell A2.

Then we specify that we’d like the starting position to be 3 + 1 = 4.

Then we use the LEN function specify that we’d like the ending position to be equal to the length of the entire string in cell A2.

The end result is that we extract all text from the fourth character to the last character in the string.

This is equivalent to extracting all of the text after the third character.

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common operations in Excel: