How to Shorten Text in Excel

This wikiHow teaches you how to shorten the appearance of data in Microsoft Excel. Before proceeding, the full unreduced data needs to be pre-entered in Excel.

Table of Contents

Shorten text with LEFT and RIGHT . formulas

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Open Microsoft Excel. If you already have a document with pre-imported data, just double-click to open it; if not, you need to open a new set of spreadsheets and import the data right away.

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Select the cell where you want the shortened text to appear. This method is suitable for text already entered in the spreadsheet.

Note: this cell must be different from the cell in which the original text is displayed.

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Enter the LEFT or RIGHT formula in the selected cell. The LEFT and RIGHT formulas are built on the same premise, but LEFT displays characters from the left of the text in the cell, and RIGHT does the opposite. The formula will be “=DIRECT(cell name, number of characters to display)”. Note: no quotes. Consider the following examples: ^{[1] X Research Sources}

=LEFT(A3, 8) will display the first 8 characters to the left in cell A3. If the text in cell A3 is “Quantity of Goods”, after it is minified, the selected cell will show as “Quantity”.
=RIGHT(B2, 5) will display the last 5 characters in cell B2. If cell B2 says “I love wikiHow”, the shortened text displayed in the selected cell will be “kiHow”.
Note: spaces are also considered characters.

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Press Enter after completing the formula. The cell that you specify will automatically display the shortened text.

Shorten text using the MID . formula

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Select the cell where you want the shortened text to appear. This cell must be different from the cell containing the target text.

If the spreadsheet is empty, you need to add the data first.

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Enter the MID formula in the selected cell. MID will truncate characters at the beginning and end of the target text. To set up the MID formula, you need to enter “=MID(cell name, number of starting characters, number of characters to display)”. Note: no quotes. See the following examples:

=MID(A1, 3, 3) will display 3 characters, starting from the third character from the left in the text in cell A1. If the text in cell A1 is “racing”, the shortened text displayed in the selected cell will be “racing”.
Similarly, =MID(B3, 4, 8) will display 8 characters, starting from the fourth character from the left in the text in cell B3. If the content in cell B3 is “COVID-19 pandemic”, the selected cell will display the shortened text “COV epidemic”.

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Press Enter after completing the formula. The cell that you specify will automatically display the shortened text.

Split text into multiple columns

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Select the cell you want to split. This is a cell that contains so many characters that it cannot be fully displayed in the cell’s space.

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Click Data in the Excel header toolbar.

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Select Text to Cpumns . This option is in the “Data Tops” section of the Data tab.

This feature will divide the content in the selected cell into several separate columns.

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Select Fixed Width . After you click Text to Cpumns , the “Convert Text to Cpumns Wizard Step 1 of 3” window will pop up. There are two options here: “Delimited” and “Fixed Width”. Delimited will split characters such as tabs or commas into each field. Usually this option is selected when you import data from another application, such as a database. Meanwhile, Fixed Width will arrange the fields into multiple columns spaced a fixed distance.

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Click Next . This window has 3 options. If you want to create a line break, click where it should be in the text. If you want to remove the line break, you can double-click it. In addition, you can also make adjustments by clicking and dragging the line to another position in the data.

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Click Next . This window has many options like “General”, “Text”, “Date” and “Do not import cpumn (skip)”. Unless you want to change the format of the cell to a state other than the original, skip this page.

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Click Finish . The text will be split into 2 or more cells.

Steps

Shorten text with LEFT and RIGHT . formulas

Shorten text using the MID . formula

Split text into multiple columns

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