You can use the following formula in Excel to check if the string in a particular cell is greater than a certain length:
=IF(LEN(A2)>4,"Greater than 4","Not Greater than 4")
This particular formula checks if the length of the string in cell A2 is greater than 4 and returns “Greater than 4” if so.
Otherwise the formula returns “Not Greater than 4.”
The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.
Example: Check if Cell Contains String with Length Greater than Certain Value
Suppose we have the following column of strings in Excel with information about various basketball teams:
We can use the following formula to check if the length of each string in the Team column is greater than 4:
=IF(LEN(A2)>4,"Greater than 4","Not Greater than 4")
We’ll type this formula into cell B2 and then click and drag it down to each remaining cell in column B:
Each cell in column B returns a string that tells us if the corresponding string in column A has a length greater than 4 or not.
Also note that we could return values other than strings if we’d like.
For example, we can use the following formula to only return the first 4 characters in a string if the length of the string is greater than 4 or return “FALSE” otherwise:
=IF(LEN(A2)>4,LEFT(A2, 4),"FALSE")
We’ll type this formula into cell B2 and then click and drag it down to each remaining cell in column B:
If the length of the string in column A is greater than 4, then only the first 4 characters of the string are returned in column B.
Otherwise, if the length of the string in column A is not greater than 4 then we simply return FALSE in column B.
Additional Resources
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Excel:
Excel: How to Check if Cell Contains Text from List
Excel: How to Calculate Average If Cell Contains Text
Excel: How to Check if Range Contains Specific Value
