IF Cell Contents Start with STRING

[ConfusedNHouston]

How would I write an IF statement that instructs Excel to evaluate the first
six characters in a given cell? By that I mean, IF(A1 begins with ABCDEF,
then, ,). IF(A2 begins with GHIJKL, then, ,). Hmm, I will need several of
these IF's in a row since the contents could begin with about 8 differing
text patterns. How would I string the IF arguments together?

I want to perform a REPLACE on a group of cells that contain brand names.
Different brand names, different string lengths, therefore the need for the
IF statements.

Thanks....

[macropod]

You'd be better off constructing this with a LOOKUP function, especially
since IF statements can only be nested 7 levels deep.

Cheers


"ConfusedNHouston" <ConfusedNHouston@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:31F2DFD4-4F44-4B2E-9BA2-25FCB776D74A@microsoft.com...
> How would I write an IF statement that instructs Excel to evaluate the
first
> six characters in a given cell? By that I mean, IF(A1 begins with ABCDEF,
> then, ,). IF(A2 begins with GHIJKL, then, ,). Hmm, I will need several
of
> these IF's in a row since the contents could begin with about 8 differing
> text patterns. How would I string the IF arguments together?
>
> I want to perform a REPLACE on a group of cells that contain brand names.
> Different brand names, different string lengths, therefore the need for
the
> IF statements.
>
> Thanks....

[MartinW]

Here's Dave Peterson's answer to a similar question in another forum. It
might help a little.


How about adding another column, then extract the first 5 digits of that
value.

=left(B2,5)
(if they're always 10 characters)

or
=left(text(b2,rept("0",10)),5)

or something????

Then use that column to extract the data.