Excel: How to Find First Number in Text String

You can use the following formulas in Excel to find the first number in a text string:

Formula 1: Return Position of First Number

=MIN(FIND({0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9},A2&"0123456789"))

This formula returns the position of the first number in a string.

For example, if the string is A0095B then this formula will return 2 since this is the position in the string where the first number occurs.

Formula 2: Return Value of First Number

=MID(A2,MIN(FIND({0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9},A2&"0123456789")),1)

This formula returns the value of the first number in a string.

For example, if the string is A0095B then this formula will return 0 since this is the value of the first number that occurs in the string.

The following example shows how to use each formula in practice with the following list of employee ID strings in Excel:

Example 1: Return Position of First Number

We can type the following formula into cell B2 to return the position of the first number in each Employee ID text string:

=MIN(FIND({0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9},A2&"0123456789"))

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

Excel find position of first number in string

Column B returns the position of the first number in each corresponding string in column A.

For example:

And so on.

We can type the following formula into cell B2 to return the value of the first number in each Employee ID text string:

=MID(A2,MIN(FIND({0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9},A2&"0123456789")),1)

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

Excel find first number in text string

Column B returns the value of the first number in each corresponding string in column A.

For example:

And so on.

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