How can I sum the first character of a column in excel?

My column has data such as:

3 DAYS
5 DAYS
8 DAYS

I'd like to sum the number of days.

I can do LEFT(B2, 1) for example to get the number, however I am not sure how to combine that with SUM to create a total.

1

2 Answers

Use SUMPRODUCT to wrap your LEFT formula:

=SUMPRODUCT(--(LEFT(A1:A3,1)))

The -- does the same as VALUE(). It turns the text value that is returned by the LEFT() function into a number.

3

Click on data option in toolbar and select text to columns

Then delimit the columns by space ,then the string is separated from numerical

Now you can sum the column

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