Head over to your Airtable workspace and open up the table where the string you want to work with is located.

Click on the "+" symbol to add a new field to your table. From the dropdown, pick the "Formula" field type.

In the formula field, use Airtable functions to pull out parts of the string.

• To grab a substring from the start: Use the LEFT() function.
  ```plaintext
  LEFT({Field Name}, number_of_characters)
  ```
  Example:
  ```plaintext
  LEFT({Description}, 5)
  ```
  This will get the first 5 characters from the "Description" field.

• To grab a substring from the end: Use the RIGHT() function.
  ```plaintext
  RIGHT({Field Name}, number_of_characters)
  ```
  Example:
  ```plaintext
  RIGHT({Description}, 5)
  ```
  This will get the last 5 characters from the "Description" field.

• To grab a substring from a specific spot: Use the MID() function.

```plaintext
MID({Field Name}, starting_position, number_of_characters)
```
Example:
```plaintext
MID({Description}, 3, 10)
```
This will get 10 characters from the "Description" field starting at the 3rd character.

For more flexible extraction where the position of the substring might not be fixed, use the FIND() function to locate the index of specific characters or substrings.

Example:

MID({Description}, FIND("start_string", {Description}) + LEN("start_string"), number_of_characters)

This formula finds the position of "start_string", adds its length to get the starting point, and then extracts the specified number of characters.

Click the "Create Field" button to save your formula field. Check the table to make sure the parts of the string you wanted are correctly extracted and displayed in the new field.