How to Get Column Letter in Google Sheets (With Example)

You can use the following syntax to get the column letter that corresponds to a specific column number in Google Sheets:

=SUBSTITUTE(ADDRESS(1,8,4),"1","")

This particular formula will return the column letter that corresponds to column 8 in the spreadsheet.

For example, this formula will return “H” since this corresponds to the letter of column 8.

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

Example: How to Get Column Letter in Google Sheets

Suppose we would like to return the column letter of the eighth column in a Google Sheets spreadsheet.

We can type the following formula into cell A1 to do so:

=SUBSTITUTE(ADDRESS(1,8,4),"1","")

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

Google Sheets get column letter

The formula returns “H” since this is the column letter that corresponds to the eighth column.

To get the column letter of a different column, simply change the 8 to a different value in the formula.

For example, suppose we instead use a 2 in the formula:

=SUBSTITUTE(ADDRESS(1,2,4),"1","")

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

The formula returns “B” since this is the column letter that corresponds to the second column.

Recall the formula that we used to get the letter that corresponds to the eighth column in Google Sheets:

=SUBSTITUTE(ADDRESS(1,8,4),"1","")

Here is how this formula works:

First, we use ADDRESS(1,8,4) to get the address of the cell in row 1, column 8, and we use 4 to specify that we’d like a relative reference.

This returns H1.

Then, we use the SUBSTITUTE function to substitute the 1 with a blank.

This returns H.

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