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MS Excel: How to Extract 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Letters from Words

This Excel tutorial explains how to use the Excel MID function to extract the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th letters from words in 4 cells to create a new word with screenshots and instructions.

Description

The Microsoft Excel MID function can be used to extract a single character or set of characters from a string. As such, you can use the MID function to create a new word by extracting letters from various words (sort of like an acronym). Let's explore how to do this.

Microsoft Excel

If you want to follow along with this tutorial, download the example spreadsheet.

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Example

In this example, we will not use the MID function to create a traditional acronym where the first letter is extracted from each word. Instead, we will extract the 1st letter from the 1st word, the 2nd letter from the 2nd word, the 3rd letter from the 3rd word, and the 4th letter from the 4th word.

Based on the spreadsheet below, the four words are found in cells A2, A3, A4 and A5:

Microsoft Excel

In cell B2, we've created the following formula to extract one letter from each of the words:

=MID(A2,1,1) & MID(A3,2,1) & MID(A4,3,1) & MID(A5,4,1)

This formula will use the MID function to extract 1 letter from each word and then concatenate the letters together using the & operator. The 1st letter is extracted from cell A2, the 2nd letter is extracted from cell A3, the 3rd letter is extracted from cell A4, and the 4th letter is extracted from cell A5. The result of this formula is the word Hope.

Since most acronyms are in uppercase, in cell C2, we've also created the following formula to show you how to convert the result to all uppercase:

=UPPER(MID(A2,1,1) & MID(A3,2,1) & MID(A4,3,1) & MID(A5,4,1))

This formula uses the UPPER function to convert the result to uppercase which gives us the word HOPE.

More Examples

Here are more examples that show how to use the MID function in Excel: