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You're an operations analyst auditing a 12-row sample of structured log lines from a microservices fleet. Each line in column A has 5 pipe-separated fields with single-space padding around each pipe:
event_id | timestamp | service | message | severity
Example: evt_001 | 2026-01-15 10:00:00 | auth-service | login_success | INFO.
You need just the service field (the 3rd field, between the 2nd and 3rd |) for grouping. The hard part is iterating FIND to land on the Nth occurrence of a delimiter — Excel's FIND only returns the first match, so the 2nd-pipe position needs FIND-starting-from-the-1st-pipe-+-1, and the 3rd-pipe position needs FIND-starting-from-the-2nd-pipe-+-1.
Recommended approach — LET stages each pipe position:
=LET(
p1, FIND("|", A2),
p2, FIND("|", A2, p1 + 1),
p3, FIND("|", A2, p2 + 1),
TRIM(MID(A2, p2 + 1, p3 - p2 - 1))
)
Three FIND calls, each starting one position past the previous match. The MID slices between p2 and p3 (exclusive of both delimiters); the outer TRIM removes the single padding space on each side.
Your task:
Graded cells: B2 (auth-service), B7 (api-gateway), B12 (notification-service).