Pulling data based on beginning cell values

[kiritine]

Hello,

I have a file with over 13,000 lines that I need to pull some data from for another report. The 1st column has a variety of codes with roughly 5 different prefixes (i.e. 4300******, A********, etc). I need to pull all the data for a few prefixes. The data is all unique (wild characters) after the prefixes.

I've tried text to columns, filter functions, ifs, match, vlookups, etc. If anyone has some ideas, then that would be a great help.

 

[Joe4]

Welcome to the Board!

One simple way would be to insert a new column, and use the LEFT function to pull off the first few characters to get the prefix, i.e.
=LEFT(A1,4)
and then you can filter on this calculated column.

 

[kiritine]

Welcome to the Board!

One simple way would be to insert a new column, and use the LEFT function to pull off the first few characters to get the prefix, i.e.
=LEFT(A1,4)
and then you can filter on this calculated column.

Hi! Thank you for your help. Would I be able to use the left function to pull multiple prefixes in one formula? Maybe if it were nested?

A number of the people I work with have extremely limited excel knowledge and skills, so I'm trying to limit how much they need to modify to prevent things getting missed or formula breaking.

 

[Joe4]

Hi! Thank you for your help. Would I be able to use the left function to pull multiple prefixes in one formula? Maybe if it were nested?

I think you may be confused by what the LEFT function does. It simply returns the first "x" number of a string. It does not care what they start with.
So the one example I gave you will pull the first 4 characters of whatever is in cell A1.

It might be best if you list out all the actual prefixes (you said there was only about 5), so we can see what they look like.

Note that if you need to automate stuff for people, you can use VBA for that.