Explanation
TheLEFT functionis perfect for extracting characters starting from the left side of a text string.
That’s where the LEN function is used.
Working from the inside out, LEN calculates the total length of each value.
For D6 (736 miles) the total length is 9.
The result is 3, which is fed to LEFT as the number of characters to extract.
LEFT then returns the text “736” as a text value.
For example, =LEFT(“apple”,3) returns “app”.
LEN will also count characters in numbers, but number formatting is not included.
VALUE Function
The Excel VALUE function converts text that appears in a recognized format (i.e.
a number, date, or time format) into a numeric value.
Normally, the VALUE function is not needed in Excel, because Excel automatically converts text to numeric values.
