Formulas I believe, again

[cware]

In my column of info I have ie....

abc
abc
abc01
trx
trx1
gaf
gaf2

What I need to do, is grab only the first three characters that are always
alpha, and remove all numbers.

Secondly, where do I go, to get real education on the formulas? I love
working with excel and my employer loves what I'm doing, but I need to go to
the next step.

Thanks!!

 

[John Bundy]

=LEFT(A1,3)

How i learned the majority of what i know of formulas was from hitting the
function button and reading the descriptions on all of the functions
available and trying the ones i liked. Other than that reading through here
for interesting requests and finding how they were solved goes a long way.
I'm sure there are plenty of books but i've never used them so can't
recommend any.

 

[Pete_UK]

Assuming that your data is in column A, then you can use this formula in B1:

=LEFT(A1,3)

and then copy down.

As regards learning formulae in Excel, you could get a book, or you could
read the postings on these newsgroups and build up your own library of
useful formulae.

Hope this helps.

Pete

 

[Dave Peterson]

You could use a helper column and put a formula like:
=left(a1,3)

You could select that column and then do
Data|text to columns (xl2003 menus)
Specify fixed width
and draw a separator line before the 4th character.

Then tell excel to ignore the 2nd field.

I don't think you can go wrong by starting with John Walkenbach's books.

Debra Dalgleish has a list of books at her site:
http://www.contextures.com/xlbooks.html

See if you can find them in your local bookstore/internet site and you can
choose what one you like best.