Tip of the Day | Friday 19 June 2026

This tool removes all characters that come after a specified number of characters in the selected Excel cells.
Only the first X characters are kept.

It is helpful for shortening values to a fixed length, such as trimming IDs, codes, or names.

It works with both text and numbers.
Formulas are replaced with their calculated values before processing.
Cells that contain dates are skipped.

Examples where you kept only the first X characters:

• "75008 Paris" → "75008" (kept first 5 characters)
• "EMP001234" → "EMP" (kept first 3 characters)
• "FR-2024-INV123" → "FR" (kept first 2 characters)
• "NL91ABNA0417164300" → "NL91" (kept first 4 characters, IBAN)
• "4111 1111 1111 1234" → "4111" (kept first 4 characters, credit card)

You can use this as a quick alternative to Excel's =LEFT() function without using formulas.

Starting this tool