REPLACE formula

Don't miss how helpful Excel's REPLACE formula can be. You can use to replace X number of characters starting at a given position in a cell.

So in this example, we're replacing the three letter prefixes for the Bates numbers listed in column A. In the formula first enter the cell where the data to be replaced appears (A2); then indicate at what position the text to be replaced begins (1 - the first character in the cell); the number of characters being replaced (3); and finally the new text be entered:

=REPLACE(A2,1,3,"IBM")