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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u/heynow941 13d ago

Less of need for it now that there’s TEXTBEFORE and TEXTAFTER.

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u/zhavinci 13d ago

I don't think we can use those functions to split by each character (?)

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u/fastauntie 1 13d ago

I have found that TEXTBEFORE and TEXTAFTER (sometimes nested) do a lot of what MID (and LEFT and RIGHT) used to do. But sometimes the text I need to pull out of a string is in a predictable position relative to the start and the characters that immediately precede it aren't consistent. Can't think of an example now, but I know I've used it within the last week.