Dissecting a String

Thanks so much for the clarification, guys. It all makes sense now!

Hi Willy, Hi Micky
Hi Peg Molter,
As Willy said we are talking in this Blog about the VBA Strings collection function MID.
The Excel VBA documentation seems to be getting increasingly bad and I often mix Excel Spreadsheet Functions and VBA Functions up.
For VBA Strings Functions you are best looking at some old VB documentation, such as
vb6.us/tutorials/vb6-string-functions
You will also there find the gem of info that you can use Mid on the left side of an assignment statement, where you can replace a substring within a string.
In VBA the differences are not a great problem, as you have the Evaluate Method which allows you to do most spreadsheet things within VBA.
Doing it the other way around is not too difficult either. Even if you are not familiar with VBA, I would strongly recommend learning the very basics so that you could, for example, make your own MID function. Then you could arrange that you had a MIDPEG function, that will work for you in the spreadsheet just as VBA Strings collection MID works.
So this would be your VBA code to make your MIDPEG function. You put that in a Normal Code Module.

Public Function MIDPEG(ByVal Str As String, ByVal Stt As Long, Optional Lenf As Long) As String ' https://excelribbon.tips.net/T012574_Dissecting_a_String.html
If Lenf = 0 Then
Let MIDPEG = Mid(Str, Stt)
Else
Let MIDPEG = Mid(Str, Stt, Lenf)
End If
End Function

After that, if you type =MIDPEG in any cell you will be able to use it just like the MID function in VBA, that is to say you can omit the last Count argument.
MIDPEG.jpg imgur.com/0ZcuTaI
Try it in this File, ( you will need to enable macros , if prompted to do it on opening ).
app.box.com/s/fueek0ccuc7715d1v2x5qqqxkvyd5jqs
If you are not too familiar with macros then check out some of Allen’s info on macros

Alan

@Peg Molter,
In addition to Willy Vanhaelen's explanation - I would like to emphazise that (in VBA) if the Num_chars argument is omitted or if there are fewer than Length characters in the text (including the character at position Start), all characters from the Start position to the End of the string - are returned.
--------------------------
Michael (Micky) Avidan
“Microsoft® Answers" - Wiki author & Forums Moderator
“Microsoft®” MVP – Excel (2009-2017)
ISRAEL

@Peg Molter
The Count argument is not optional in the Excel MID function but, as mentioned in the first sentence, this tip is about VBA (Visual Basic for Applications, used in Excel macros) and there it is optional.
SomeVariable = Mid("VBA Mid function",5,3) returns "Mid"
SomeVariable = Mid("VBA Mid function",5) returns "Mid function"

The argument Count is not optional for the MID function. I tried it without it, wondering what it would return. It returned an ERROR and told me I had too few arguments.