Excel how to copy the first five characters

Each time we are writing content on pieces of paper, books, emails, and a word document, we mainly aim at speed and accuracy. The very main reason that makes writers not achieve speed is the continuous repetition of words or similar content.

To avoid this kind of mistake, Microsoft Office came up with functions to copy, save, paste, and delete written content. It also came up with shortcuts to perform those operations in which the majority of them are readily available on the computer and laptop's keyboards.

In excel sheets we do copy characters so that we avoid retyping them again, the copy command in most cases is followed by the paste command. If you copy a list of data in cells you can easily paste them on another excel to save you the time of retyping over and over.

Copying values or characters also helps when you need to delete the characters without affecting any other characters, it also helps reduce errors you could encounter when retyping the characters again.

To copy the first five characters, there are a series of steps to follow that include;

Step 1

We need to come up with a dataset that we are going to use to successfully copy the first five characters. Open excel and record data in two of the columns, on column A header write the email and list down email addresses as shown below.

Step 2

In this step, we are going to use the copy command to copy the usernames and separate them with the addresses. For us to achieve this, we will use the LEFT function to help us in the selection of the first five characters which in our case are usernames.

We are going to use the formula, =LEFT (A2, 5) to copy the first five characters in each cell. The characters that we will copy will appear on different cells; in this case, the cells will be under column D with the column header names. In our formula, we are using the LEFT function to select the cells, A2 is the first cell but you can use any other cell below it, and finally, 5 is the number of characters to remove.