LEN Function

Returns the length of a given text string

Over 1.8 million professionals use CFI to learn accounting, financial analysis, modeling and more. Start with a free account to explore 20+ always-free courses and hundreds of finance templates and cheat sheets.

What is the LEN Function?

The LEN Function[1] is categorized under Excel TEXT functions. The function will return the length of a given text string.

In financial analysis, the LEN function can be useful if we wish to get the length of a given text string as the number of characters. LEN will also count characters in numbers, but number formatting is not included.

Formula

=LEN(text)

The LEN function uses only one argument:

1. Text (required argument) – This is the text for which we wish to calculate the length. We can provide the text argument for the function:

  • Directly
  • As a string returned from another formula
  • As a reference to a cell containing a string

How to use the LEN Function in Excel?

As a worksheet function, LEN can be entered as part of a formula in a cell of a worksheet. To understand the uses of the function, let us consider an example:

Example 1

Let’s see how we can test a few conditions. Suppose we are given the following values:

LEN Function


We will get the results below:

LEN Function - Example 1

In the examples above:

  1. Spaces are counted as characters. Hence, the function returned 13 for the first argument.
  2. The length of the empty string is 0.

Example 2

Let us now use the LEN function to remove characters from the data below:

LEN Function - Example 2


We wish to remove miles from the Distance column. For removing the last n characters from a text string, we can use a formula based on the LEFT and LEN functions. We can use a formula to strip the last 5 characters of a value, starting on the left. The formula to use will be =VALUE(LEFT(D5
,LEN(D5)-6)).

LEN Function - Example 2a

We will get the result below:

LEN Function - Example 2b

In the formula above, the LEFT function extracted characters from the left side of a value as we specified. We then used the LEN function to calculate the total length of each value. For example, the length of 1035 miles is 9.

To get the number of characters to extract, we subtracted 6, which is the length of ” miles” (including the space character). The result is 4, which is fed to LEFT as the number of characters to extract. LEFT then returns the text “1035” as a text value.

As we wanted a numeric value and not a text value, we ran the text through the VALUE function, which converted numbers in text format to plain numbers.

Click here to download the sample Excel file

Additional Resources

Thanks for reading CFI’s guide to important Excel functions! By taking the time to learn and master these functions, you’ll significantly speed up your financial analysis. To learn more, check out these additional CFI resources:

Article Sources

  1. LEN Function
0 search results for ‘