Occasionally you need to convert a specific string to remove some x number of characters at the beginning of the string. How to remove unwanted charactersCheck out my online cour. In the excel sheet most of the values are entered with double " quotes. For this, there are two parameters we should focus: Replacement: Replacement value, which should be an empty string ("") for removing the characters. Hi all- I'm fairly new to using excel, and I have a spreadsheet that has data in both English and Chinese, essentially the same data twice in each cell, once in each language. To extract the leftmost characters from a string, use the LEFT function in Excel. The only problem is that FIND and SEARCH look from left to right in a string. For example: =LEFT (A3, 6) displays the first six characters in cell A3. The Left function can extract characters from the left side only. =mid (A1,5,9^9) Here take care of one thing. Yes, the function MID is also useful to remove the first n characters in Google Docs Sheets and Excel. For this you can use a very handy function: LEFT() LEFT() returns the first X characters in a string, based on the amount of characters you specify. To extract a substring (of any length) before the dash, add the FIND function. For example, if you want to delete the first 3 characters just convert the third argument into 3 to REPLACE (A2,1,3, "). The second method uses a formula that combines together the LEFT and the FIND Excel functions. Set ws = Worksheets ("Analysis") You can also perform the same feat of removing the first four characters of a string using the Excel MID function. REPLACE Function To remove characters from the left of a cell, we can use the REPLACE function to replace the first characters with an empty string. We can use the 'LEFT' function to extract the first three characters of the source string which in this case happens to be the day of the week.