Have you ever needed to remove the first character of a string and keep the rest in Google Sheets? Manual deletion is fine for a small dataset, but when you have dozens or hundreds of cells with this requirement, using built-in formulas is the way to go.
In this quick Google Sheets tutorial, I will show you how to remove the first character of a string in Google Sheets using text formulas.
Using the RIGHT Formula
Let’s say you have a dataset like the one shown below and you want to get rid of the first character, keeping only the numeric part:
Here is the formula that will remove the first character and give you the rest of the string:
=RIGHT(A2, LEN(A2)-1)The formula first checks the length of the string (using the LEN function) and then subtracts 1 from it. This gives us the number of characters we want to get from the right side of the string.
This value is then used in the RIGHT function to extract all the characters from a string, except the first one.
Using the MID Formula
Another way to remove the first character and get the rest is by using the MID formula. It follows the same logic as the RIGHT function, with a slight difference in the syntax.
The formula below will give us everything except the first character of the string:
=MID(A2,2,LEN(A2)-1)The MID formula asks for the starting position (from which it should start extracting characters) and the number of characters to extract.
You can further shorten this formula by using the following:
=MID(A2,2,99999)In the above formula, I give the MID function the starting position (which will be 2 because I don’t want the first character) and the length of characters to extract.
Instead of using the LEN function to count the characters, I used a very high number to extract all characters. In case there are fewer characters (as in our example), it simply extracts everything.
Using the REPLACE Formula
There are multiple ways to achieve the same thing with different formulas in Google Sheets.
Another quick way to do it would be to replace the first character with an empty character, and you can do this using the REPLACE function.
Here is the formula that will remove the first character and give you the rest:
=REPLACE(A2,1,1,"")The above formula starts from the first position and replaces the first character with a blank.
Note: In the three examples covered here, the result is obtained through a formula. If you don’t want to keep the formula once you have the result, convert it to values. This way, you can even get rid of the original data if you don’t need it.
I hope you found this tutorial useful!
For more Google Sheets tutorials, visit Crawlan.com.
