Skip to content
Free Excel Tutorials
  • Home
  • Excel For Beginners
  • Excel Intermediate
  • Advanced Excel For Experts

Data Analysis

  • Subtotal function in Excel
  • How To Filter Data in Excel
  • What-If Analysis: Scenarios and Goal Seek in Excel
  • Conditional Formatting Data bars Examples in Excel
  • How To Insert and Customize Sparklines in Excel

References

  • How to get first column number in range in Excel
  • How to get relative row numbers in a range in Excel
  • How to use Excel ROWS Function
  • How to get relative column numbers in a range in Excel
  • How to get last column number in range in Excel

Data Validations

  • Excel Data validation whole percentage only
  • Data validation must not exist in list
  • Excel Data validation allow uppercase only
  • Excel Data validation date in next 30 days
  • Excel Data validation only dates between

Get first name from full name — Manipulating NAMES in Excel

by

If you need extract the first name from a full name, you can easily do so with the FIND and LEFT functions. In the  formula below, name is a full name, with a space separating the first name from other parts of the name.

Note: this formula does not account for titles (Ms., Mr., etc) in the full name. If titles exist, they should be removed first.

Formula

=LEFT(name,FIND(" ",name)-1)

Explanation

In the example, the active cell contains this formula:

=LEFT(B4,FIND(" ",B4)-1)

How this formula works

The FIND function finds the first space character (” “) in the name and returns the position of that space in the full name. The number 1 is subtracted from this number to account for the space itself. This number is used by the LEFT function as the total number of characters that should be extracted in the next step below. In the example, the first space is at position 6, minus 1, equals 5 characters to extract.

The LEFT function extracts characters from the full name starting on the left and continuing up to the number of characters determined in the previous step above. In the example, 5 is the total number of characters, so the result is “Susan”.

Post navigation

Next Post:

Create One-dimensional and Two-dimensional Array

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Learn Basic Excel

Ribbon
Workbook
Worksheets
Format Cells
Find & Select
Sort & Filter
Templates
Print
Share
Protect
Keyboard Shortcuts

Categories

  • Charts
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Validation
  • Excel Functions
    • Cube Functions
    • Database Functions
    • Date and Time Functions
    • Engineering Functions
    • Financial Functions
    • Information Functions
    • Logical Functions
    • Lookup and Reference Functions
    • Math and Trig Functions
    • Statistical Functions
    • Text Functions
    • Web Functions
  • Excel VBA
  • Excel Video Tutorials
  • Formatting
  • Grouping
  • Others

Logical Functions

  • Return blank if in Excel
  • Invoice status with nested if in Excel
  • How to use Excel XOR Function
  • IF with wildcards in Excel
  • XOR function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation

Date Time

  • Count day of week between dates in Excel
  • ISOWEEKNUM function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • Convert date to month and year in Excel
  • Get last working day in month in Excel
  • Add decimal minutes to time in Excel

Grouping

  • Group arbitrary text values in Excel
  • Group numbers with VLOOKUP in Excel
  • Running count group by n size in Excel
  • How to randomly assign data to groups in Excel
  • Group numbers at uneven intervals in Excel

General

  • Share Excel data with Word documents
  • Print Excel Sheet In Landscape Or Portrait
  • Basic text sort formula in Excel
  • How to add sequential row numbers to a set of data in Excel
  • Basic numeric sort formula in Excel
© 2025 xlsoffice . All Right Reserved. | Teal Smiles | Abbreviations And Their Meaning