How to Remove Text From a Cell in Google Sheets

How to Remove Text From a Cell in Google Sheets

To remove text from a cell in Google Sheets, pick the function that matches the part you are cutting. LEFT keeps the head of the string, RIGHT keeps the tail, and SUBSTITUTE deletes a specific word wherever it appears.

All five work on clean data and all five misfire on real exports. Each section below covers one case, the exact error it throws, and the fix. At the end, one =FITS() formula replaces the lot.

Remove Text After a Character (LEFT plus FIND)

The classic pairing finds the character, then keeps everything to its left.

Perfect, right up until a cell has no @ in it. FIND cannot find it, so it returns #VALUE!, and your column fills with errors. Now you need a wrapper.

Then someone asks for the text before the last slash instead of the first. FIND only searches left to right. There is no FINDLAST. So you end up with something like this.

And regex brings its own trap. Cutting at a period or a question mark means escaping it, because those characters are operators. Forget the backslash and the formula silently matches the wrong thing.

Remove Text Before a Character in Google Sheets

To remove everything before a character, use RIGHT with LEN and FIND. LEN measures the full string, FIND locates the character, and the difference is the number of characters to keep on the right.

For sara@example.com that returns example.com. Note there is no minus one in this version, and that trips almost everybody who writes it straight after the LEFT one.

Here is why. FIND returns the position of the @ itself, which is 5 in sara@example.com. The string is 16 characters long, so LEN minus FIND gives 11, which is exactly the length of example.com. Subtract an extra one out of habit and you keep 10 characters, returning xample.com. Add one instead and you get @example.com with the delimiter still attached.

The same two failure modes carry over. A row with no @ returns #VALUE!, and FIND only matches the first occurrence. For a path like /reports/2026/q3.csv, FIND stops at the first slash. To cut at the last one, count how many there are and target that occurrence.

That reads as "one or more characters that are not a slash, anchored to the end of the string." It works, and it is also the point where most people stop reading and paste something from a forum without knowing what it does.

Remove the First or Last N Characters in a Cell

When the cut is by position rather than by delimiter, drop FIND and subtract the number directly from LEN.

A SKU exported as US-1024-BLK becomes 1024-BLK with the first formula, because the US- prefix is 3 characters. A filename like q3-report.csv becomes q3-report with the second, because .csv is 4 characters including the dot.

The failure mode here is a short row. If a cell holds only 2 characters and you subtract 3, the count goes negative and LEFT or RIGHT returns #VALUE!. That is not a data quality problem you will spot by eye, because it usually hides in a handful of rows in the middle of a long export. Wrap the formula in IFERROR, or fix the rows.

The FITS Way (Just Name the Character)

With FITS, you describe the cut. Missing delimiters do not blow up the column.

Need the last occurrence instead of the first? Say "last". That is the whole change.

Flipping to the other side of the delimiter is the same edit. There is no swap from LEFT to RIGHT, and no minus one to remember or forget.

No IFERROR. No escaping. No rewriting the formula from scratch when the rule flips direction.

Remove Text From an Entire Column at Once

To apply the cut down a whole column, wrap the formula in ARRAYFORMULA and hand it a range instead of a single cell.

Both guards are doing real work. The IF on blank cells stops ARRAYFORMULA running the cut on every empty row below your data, which otherwise fills the rest of the sheet with errors. The IFERROR handles the rows that are populated but missing the delimiter.

Leave either one out and the column looks broken in two different ways. That is the real cost of the formula approach at column scale, and it is why so many people give up and do it by hand.

Deleting a fixed word rather than cutting at a delimiter is a different job, handled by SUBSTITUTE. See remove a word from an entire column in Google Sheets. If the thing you are stripping is punctuation or symbols rather than words, see remove special characters in Google Sheets, and for stray padding around otherwise clean values see trim extra spaces in Google Sheets.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I remove text from a cell in Google Sheets?

Pick the function that matches the part you are cutting. LEFT keeps the head of the string, RIGHT keeps the tail, and SUBSTITUTE deletes a specific word wherever it appears. Use =LEFT(A1, FIND("@", A1) - 1) to remove everything after a character, =RIGHT(A1, LEN(A1) - FIND("@", A1)) to remove everything before it, and =SUBSTITUTE(A1, "Inc.", "") to delete a word.

How do I remove text before a character in Google Sheets?

Use =RIGHT(A1, LEN(A1) - FIND("@", A1)). There is no minus one in this version, unlike the LEFT one. FIND already returns the position of the character itself, so subtracting that position drops it. Adding a minus one out of habit cuts one character too many.

How do I remove text after a character in Google Sheets?

Use =LEFT(A1, FIND("@", A1) - 1). The minus one is required here, otherwise the @ is kept. If any row is missing the character, FIND returns #VALUE! and the column fills with errors, so use =IFERROR(LEFT(A1, FIND("@", A1) - 1), A1) to leave those rows unchanged.

How do I remove the first character from a cell in Google Sheets?

Use =RIGHT(A1, LEN(A1) - 1) and raise the 1 to drop more. To remove the last character instead, use =LEFT(A1, LEN(A1) - 1). If a cell is shorter than the number you subtract, the count goes negative and the formula returns #VALUE!, so guard short rows with IFERROR.

How do I remove text from a cell but keep the numbers?

LEFT and RIGHT cut by position, so neither helps when the digits sit anywhere in the string. Use =REGEXREPLACE(A1, "[^0-9.]", "") to strip everything that is not a digit or a decimal point, then wrap it in VALUE to get a real number rather than a numeric-looking string. For the messier cases, see extracting numbers from text in Google Sheets.

When to Use Each

LEFT and FIND are fine when every cell is guaranteed to contain the delimiter exactly once. Reach for =FITS() when rows are inconsistent or the rule is fuzzy. Related reads: separate first and last name, extract the domain from a URL, and the full guide to automating Google Sheets tasks you used to need regex for. If you want every piece rather than the first one, see splitting text by delimiter in Google Sheets. If you want the middle piece rather than the head or the tail, see extracting text between two characters, and if the piece you are after is a figure, see extracting numbers from text. If the cleanup has to run across a whole export rather than a handful of rows, read how to format 8000 rows at once first.