How it works.
RIGHT extracts a substring from the right side of a text string based on a specified number of characters. If num_chars is omitted, it defaults to 1.
💡 In simple terms.
Extracts a specific number of characters starting from the very end (right edge) of a text cell.
Analogy
"Think of this like reading the last few letters of a filename to see if it is a photo (.png) or a document (.txt)."
Syntax guide.
=RIGHT(text, [num_chars])
Parameters
textRequired
The text string that contains the characters you want to extract.
num_charsOptional
Specifies the number of characters you want RIGHT to extract.
Default: 1Interactive formula builder.
Fill in the input arguments below to construct your custom formula string. Copy it directly to paste into your Excel spreadsheets.
Generated Output
Best Practices
- Use RIGHT to extract zip codes, phone suffixes, or file extensions from lists.
- Just like LEFT, if num_chars exceeds text length, all text is returned.
Common Gotchas
- RIGHT will count trailing spaces as characters. Use TRIM first if your data has trailing whitespace.