Excel - RegEx Building Blocks - 2643

Microsoft Excel Tutorial: Learning the Building Blocks for RegEx in Excel
Learn the basic building blocks of RegEx in Excel.

Welcome back to MrExcel's YouTube channel! In this video, we'll dive into the building blocks for mastering Regular Expressions (RegEx) and their integration in Excel. If you find this video helpful, don’t forget to click the Like button below – it helps us reach more viewers. We've got over 2,500 videos on various Excel topics, so there's plenty to explore!

This video is designed to get you comfortable with RegEx, even if you're a complete beginner. I’ll walk you through examples like matching specific sequences of letters, using wildcards, and understanding special characters. By the end, you’ll have a solid foundation in using RegEx within Excel. Don’t forget to download the tip card below, summarizing everything we discuss today.

One of the key points we’ll cover is how different characters and sequences can be matched using RegEx patterns. For instance, how to specify that a cell starts with a certain string or contains a specific character set. These examples will demonstrate the versatility and power of RegEx in data manipulation and search tasks.

Lastly, I’ll share some advanced techniques, like using repetition operators and handling white spaces, including tricky non-breaking spaces. This will prepare you to tackle more complex text processing tasks in Excel. As always, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments, and I'll be sure to address them.

Thanks for watching! If you enjoyed this video, please Like, Subscribe, and Ring the Bell to stay updated with all my latest Excel tips and tutorials. See you next time for another exciting video from MrExcel!

Table of Contents
(00:00) Intro to RegEx Building Blocks
(00:10) MrExcel GPT to answer your Excel questions
(00:30) Download RegEx Tip Card
(00:41) Building Blocks of RegEx
(01:13) RegEx Basics
(02:15) RegEx Starts With or Ends With
(02:35) RegEx Two Meanings of Tilde
(03:52) RegEx Wildcards
(05:48) More RegEx Wildcards
(08:05) Repetition in RegEx
(12:07) Whitespace in RegEx
(14:02) Converting Non-Breaking Space to Space Using RegEx
(16:24) Returning part of a match in REGEXEXTRACT
(18:50) Transposing multiple spilled results
(19:30) Download the Workbook
(19:46) Like, Subscribe & Ring the Bell

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[alanlawws]

The sample file is probably the best example file available, using the latest 2024 Excel Regex formulas to explain Regular expressions. Bill, thanks.

[reanalytics]

Can't wait to have these functions generally available, a see data validation, conditional formatting, logic etc in excel going to a whole new level
Thank you for the good explanation, very helpfule

[erikguzik]

Awesome video as always. Great explanation and samples. Going to download and study this. This will come in handy for so many things

[iankr]

Good grief! Trying to get my head round the logic of some of these. Many thanks!

[suatmozgur]

I loved Regex in Excel! Thanks for the video, MrExcel! 15:55 TRIM could be entirely ruled out by replacing multiple \s =REGEXREPLACE(C20, "\s+", " ") 😉

[Sergij_Vari]

Could you try to increase the quality compression of the video while recording? Thanks for video!

[thinktoomuchb]

If cell A1 has the number we're looking for in cell C3, which has a list of numbers separated by commas and/or spaces, how would we find it using a Regex? For example, if cell A1 has the number 1 and cell C3 has 1, 5, 11, 18, then how do we find 1 and not 11 and 18? Something like find 1 (reference A1) when the characters before and after it are not numbers?

[GeertDelmulle]

Thanks Mr.Excel for this great crash course on RegEx! :-)

[ExcelInstructor]

I tried those but somehow they failed,
Is there maybe language dependency for the symbols like dot, comma, slash or backslash?

[johnborg]

Thanks Mr Excel.
I am on Beta and I still don't have them (: