Microsoft Excel

Excel Formula Completion: How to Extract Zip Codes from Text with REGEXEXTRACT

Chris Menard

26 Jan 2026 — 4 min read

Excel's Formula Completion feature can write formulas for you. Just press the equal sign, and Excel suggests the formula based on your data and column headers. In this tutorial, I demonstrate how it works by tackling a common challenge: extracting zip codes from messy address data where the zip code appears in different positions within each cell.

The Challenge: Zip Codes in Different Positions

The dataset contains customer addresses in column C, with zip codes embedded at various positions — some at the beginning, some in the middle, some at the end. The goal is to extract just the five-digit zip code into column D.

Excel spreadsheet showing customer addresses with zip codes in varying positions and an empty Zip Code column — The starting data: addresses with zip codes scattered in different positions. Column D is ready for the extracted values.

Step 1: Add a Column Header

Before triggering Formula Completion, add a descriptive column header. I typed "Zip Code" in cell D1. This is important because Excel uses column headers to understand what you want to extract — the header guides the AI suggestion.

Step 2: Trigger Formula Completion

Click on cell D2 (the first data row) and press the equal sign (=). Excel's Formula Completion immediately suggests a REGEXEXTRACT formula:

Excel Formula Completion suggesting REGEXEXTRACT formula with tooltip showing Extract zip code from address — Formula Completion suggests =REGEXEXTRACT(C2,"\b\d{5}\b",0,0) with a tooltip confirming it will extract the zip code from the address.

The suggested formula is =REGEXEXTRACT(C2,"\b\d{5}\b",0,0). Here is what the regex pattern means:

\b — word boundary (ensures we match a standalone number, not part of a longer number)
\d{5} — exactly five digits
\b — closing word boundary

Press Tab to accept the suggestion.

Step 3: Fill Down and Verify

After accepting the formula for the first row, fill it down to all remaining rows. The formula correctly extracts the five-digit zip code from every address, regardless of where it appears in the cell.

Excel spreadsheet showing all zip codes successfully extracted into column D using REGEXEXTRACT — All zip codes extracted correctly — the REGEXEXTRACT formula handles addresses with zip codes in any position.

Requirements

Formula Completion requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, Excel for the web, and Beta channel access. It is not yet available in the desktop version of Excel.