To get the first name, you can use FIND (or SEARCH) in conjunction with the LEFT function:Īs you probably know, the Excel LEFT function returns the specified number of left-most characters in a string. Supposing you have a column of names (column A) and you want to pull the First name and Last name into separate columns.
To make things easier to understand, consider the following example. This example shows how you can find and extract all characters in a text string to the left or to the right of a specific character. Find a string preceding or following a given character Typically, you would utilize them in combination with other functions such as MID, LEFT or RIGHT, and the following formula examples demonstrate some real-life uses. In practice, the Excel FIND and SEARCH functions are rarely used on their own. To find an actual question mark (?) or asterisk (*), type a tilde (~) before the corresponding character. To see how it works on real data, consider the following example:Īs you see in the screenshot above, the formula SEARCH("function*2013", A2) returns the position of the first character ("f") in the substring if the text string referred to in the within_text argument contains both "function" and "2013", no matter how many other characters there are in between.
How to obtain word and excel for free series#
How to obtain word and excel for free how to#
Is syntax and arguments are akin to those of FIND: The SEARCH function in Excel is very similar to FIND in that it also returns the location of a substring in a text string.