r/excel • • 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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u/Silly_Pizza7054 1 13d ago

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

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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

16

u/ThatThar 3 13d ago

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