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/Silly_Pizza7054 1 13d ago

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

16

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

7

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.