The modern ways to extract text in Excel . . . Not too long ago, extracting text in Excel was a bit of a nightmare. Sure, we've always had functions like LEFT, RIGHT, MID, LEN, and FIND to help us, but even the simplest extractions could require a lengthy formula. That changed last year, as Microsoft announced a new set of text functions that made things significantly easier for us: ➤ TEXTBEFORE — return text from a value that is before a specific delimiter. ➤ TEXTAFTER — return text from a valu