You can use LEFT if you like. I've always used VALUE with LEFT since many years ago when I was programming in SAS. As for the *10000 or *1000, ... If we have an amount of 0.08 then the first digit is an 8 because zero is inadmissible as a first digit. The first digit is the leftmost nonzero digit. So programming LEFT of 0.08 in Excel will give you a 0 and not the correct answer of 8. However if we multiply 0.08 by 1000 then the first digit will be correct as 8 (0.08 * 1000 = 80.00) and the first-two digits will be correct as 80 (because 0.08 can be written as 0.080). If we have a large amount such as $180,583 then after multiplying by 1,000 we'll still get the correct first digit using LEFT. If you want to be top notch then you can use IF and only multiply numbers less than 10 by 1,000. This will avoid LEFT(A1,2) where A1 is 2.34 giving you "2." as the first-two digits.

@@ForensicAnalytics Thank you for clarification and explanation of using VALUE and a multiplication by 1000. Totally makes sense! Thank you again!

That data will probably not conform to Benford's Law. First, Benford's Law assumes "long" numbers with about four or more digits on average. It should be okay for three digit numbers. For data sets with small numbers (all numbers under 100) the formula is different and is more biased towards the low digits. Second, Benford's Law works well with accounting, finance, and earth science data. What you have is text data. I think that you would be better off reading up on Zipf's law and other related topics such as term frequencies and word frequencies. Finally, it goes without saying that your "the" distribution is heavily dependent on the language used and the type of article. Business-related research articles are sometimes 20,000 words long whereas articles in regional or local newspapers might all be under 1,000 words.

Thanks sir.

Hello sir, I got the data from a book. There were 217 data or times The first digits frequencies were as follow: 1 - 19 times 2- 10 times 3 - 15 times 4 - 5 times 5 - 8 times 6 - 3 times 7 - 4 times 8 - 0 times (none) 9 - 2 times Is it obey the Benford's Law predictions Sir? Thanks in advance

@@jimberence No, that data does not conform to Benford's Law. Chapter 4 of my book Forensic Analytics Second Edition discusses measuring conformity in depth.

@@ForensicAnalytics tq very much sir.