It is a common task to extract certain texts from a cell in Excel. For example, we may want to
- get the length of the cell content,
- extract the first or last N characters,
- extract the text in a range,
- or even a portion of text that is before/after or even in-between specific delimiters.
If you are good in Excel formula, you may be able to achieve this by constructing formula with Excel functions such as LEN, LEFT, MID, LEFT, etc. For simple scenario, it works fine. Nevertheless, let’s face the fact that not everyone is good at writing Excel formula. Also, we must admit that there are some scenarios where only “complex” formula can help.
Unbelievably, with Power Query we don’t need to write a single formula to extract values from a column under many different circumstances. Most of the tasks can be done via User Interface.
You may download a sample file to follow along.
Too nice to be true? Let’s watch it in action.
wmfexcel 