In this video, we are going to learn how to get instant help when using a function. Since there are hundreds of functions available, how can excel help me to find the function that I need? And then learn how to apply it? And let's take the following example. If I know exactly what I'd like to achieve, for example, I need to extract only the text and not the number from all of these cells. Is there a way to find out if there is a function that can assist us with this process?
And if we found the correct function, how can excel help us through the process of understanding what arguments it needs to give us the desired output? The quickest way is to click on the FX button for Insert Function, or you can use the shortcut of shift and f3. This brings up the Insert Function dialog box. And the first part of this is the search in which we can tap what we are looking for, and see if there is a function that can help somebody To extract text and hit enter. Excel provides us with a range of functions that it thinks might be able to assist us. We can read a little bit about each of these functions to determine if it is in fact going to help us.
The first function it suggests is mud. What is Medusa, it returns the characters from the middle of a text string, given a starting position and length. Since I want to extract only the text and not the number, we can actually see that the text is on the left hand side. So this doesn't seem like it's gonna work. The right function returns the specified number of characters from the end of a text string. So as we can start to see, that's the opposite of what we want, which means that it's very likely that the left function is going to be what we need, and returns the specified number of characters from the start of a texturing.
And this is going to work great class. So even though we didn't know that function existed before. Now that we can see it might help us simply click OK. Now you'll notice that Excel topped out the left function in the cell, that it opened up this function arguments dialog box where we can get a bit of information about these different arguments, and what XML actually requires from us. So for example, the first argument that we are on which is in bold text says it is the text string containing the characters that you want to extract. So we simply need to point to this cell next door. Can you see it also gives you a live preview of what it's going to look like.
We can simply click on the next argument, and that now provides us with information of what it's requesting. This argument specifies how many characters you want the lift function to extract and if you leave it blank, it simply extracts one letter. But if you notice in our pets Over here, the text is always three letters long. So by tapping the number three, we actually get a live preview of what it's going to look like. And that is going to be the perfect answer, extracting the letters of IMT from the numbers 001. Clicking OK provides that answer for us.
Now, even if you had topped out the lift function from the start, you can always get into the function arguments dialog box for some assistance, simply pressing the fx icon once you're within the function. As you can see, that launches the dialog box we had a moment ago. So that's looking great. So in summary, the Insert Function dialog box can help us to firstly find the function that might be applicable. Once we find the function that we think can help us get the desired results. We can use the function arguments dialog box to assist us in briefly explaining a little bit about what each argument is.
Asking for let's see in the next video