IF Cell Contents Start with STRING

[Guest]

How would I write an IF statement that instructs Excel to evaluate the first
six characters in a given cell? By that I mean, IF(A1 begins with ABCDEF,
then, ,). IF(A2 begins with GHIJKL, then, ,). Hmm, I will need several of
these IF's in a row since the contents could begin with about 8 differing
text patterns. How would I string the IF arguments together?

I want to perform a REPLACE on a group of cells that contain brand names.
Different brand names, different string lengths, therefore the need for the
IF statements.

Thanks....

 

[macropod]

You'd be better off constructing this with a LOOKUP function, especially
since IF statements can only be nested 7 levels deep.

Cheers

 

[MartinW]

Here's Dave Peterson's answer to a similar question in another forum. It
might help a little.


How about adding another column, then extract the first 5 digits of that
value.

=left(B2,5)
(if they're always 10 characters)

or
=left(text(b2,rept("0",10)),5)

or something????

Then use that column to extract the data.