I did some searching and in openoffice and excel it looks like you can simply add an * at the beginning or end of a character to delete everything before and after it, but in Google spreadsheet this isn't working. Does it support this feature? So if I have:

<pre>keyword USD 0078945jg .12 N N 5748 8</pre>

And I want to remove USD and everything after it what do I use? I have tried:

<pre>USD* and (USD*) with regular expressions checked</pre>

But it doesn't work. Any ideas?

In addition to options that would be available in Excel (LEFT + FIND) pointed out by pnuts, you can use a variety of regex tools available in Google Sheets for text searching / manipulation

For example, RegexReplace:

<!-- language: lang-none -->
=REGEXREPLACE(A1,"(.*)USD.*","$1")
  • (.*) <- capture group () with zero or more * of any character .
  • USD.* <- exact match on USD followed by zero or more * of any character .
  • $1 <- replace with match in first capture group

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