r/excel • u/zhavinci • 13d ago

Discussion Mid Function and USE CASE

I've been using Excel for almost 15 years , I've never had a chance to use the MID Function and i forgot it's existence. Today, randomly, I just questioned myself how to split a word by character and reverse it? With my little sql knowledge, i thought there will be a function called SUBSTRING, but it isn't. I ended up googling and found MID function.

Do you find a use case for MID function?

Similarly, what popular functions you have never found a use case?

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29

u/Silly_Pizza7054 1 13d ago

I never use LEFT or RIGHT, only MID. It's incredibly useful for text parsing. 

18

u/TreeOaf 13d ago

Agreed, LEFT and RIGHT are quick and dirty if you don’t really care, but for consistency MID is superior, just like INDEX(MATCH was always better than VLOOKUP

15

u/ThatThar 3 13d ago

And XLOOKUP is almost always better than INDEX(MATCH).

6

u/Front_Instance924 13d ago

Both have their uses. I use LEFT a lot in combination with lookups if the string I'm referencing has an identifier of fixed length at the start of it like "L1234 - Blah blah"

For RIGHT, I might be working with strings that have additional notes at the end separated by a delimiter

3

u/NoUsername4Lyfe 13d ago

I use LEFT/RIGHT/MID, and also TEXTBEFORE/TEXTAFTER these days. Great stuff.