LEN is often used, as in your example, so that you can strip off leading
characters, and not lose any. By using LEN, you don't have to guess how big
a cell is, you use its actual value.

For example, say we want to strip off the first 3 characters for the
following sequence

ABC123
XYZ99999999
AAA1

We don't actually strip characters away, we return all but those characters.
But, how many characters do we allow for, 3, 7, 1? By using LEN we can
calculate the lengths (6, 10, 4) and extract all but the first 3
(LEN(A1)-3).Combine that with RIGHT(A1,that_num) and we return
123
9999999
1

--

HTH

Bob Phillips

(replace xxxx in the email address with gmail if mailing direct)

" wrote in
message ...
It sounds dumb & real silly, I can't figure the definition or meaning in
laymans term for the LEN function and why is it used in so many functions.
The definition in the help section doesn't say much about LEN.

For example =RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-3)

Please help. Thank you.