=SEARCH(Character to find, String to look into, Position to start)

When using the function SEARCH

You want to extract the mobile numbers in column A. The mobile numbers are in the string after the character "/". As you can see in this picture, the position of the symbol "/" is not always in the same position. Sometimes it's because of the dialing code, and sometimes because there are spaces around the "/" symbol.

So the important thing is to locate the position of the character "/" in the cell in order to extract all the characters on the left of it.

• Excel 365 has 2 incredible functions TEXTBEFORE and TEXTAFTER to extract substrings according to a delimiter
• Split your text on a delimiter – TEXTSPLIT Function

Find the position of a character

The position of the symbol "/" is given by this formula.

=SEARCH("/",A2)

So, for the first phone number, the first "/" is in the 9th position in the string

Example 1: Extract the first phone number

As we want to extract the first mobile number (with area code) we will use the LEFT function, and the formula in column C is

=LEFT(A2,SEARCH("/",A2))

Extract the position of the mobile number

The mobile number is after the string "cell:". So now, we are going to write a new SEARCH function with this specific string

=SEARCH("cell:",A2)

As you can see, for the last string, there is an error. This error occurs when the string is not found.

Use the function IFERROR

To avoid returning an error, we can use the wonderful IFERROR function.

=IFERROR(formula, result in case of error)

So here, we can simply write

=IFERROR(SEARCH("cell:",A2),"")

Example 2: Extract the mobile phone

Watch out! The position returned by the function is the position of the first character, not the last one. So we must add to the result of the function the value 5. The string "cell:" has 5 characters

=IFERROR(SEARCH("cell:",A2)+5,"")

Example 3: Extract the last phone number

To extract the last phone number, we will write the following formula

=IFERROR(RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-D2),"")