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

Data Analysis

  • Get column name from index in Excel Table
  • How to create running total in an Excel Table
  • How To Load Analysis ToolPak in Excel
  • How To Remove Duplicates In Excel Column Or Row?
  • Use Data Form to input, edit and delete records in Excel

References

  • MATCH function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • Perform case-sensitive Lookup in Excel
  • How to get relative column numbers in a range in Excel
  • Two-column Lookup in Excel
  • How to use Excel FORMULATEXT function

Data Validations

  • Excel Data validation must contain specific text
  • Excel Data validation no punctuation
  • Excel Data validation must begin with
  • Excel Data validation specific characters only
  • Excel Data validation require unique number

How to get last word in a cell in Excel

by

To get the last word from a text string, you can use a formula based on the TRIM, SUBSTITUTE, RIGHT, and REPT functions.

Formula

=TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(text," ",REPT(" ",100)),100))

Explanation

In the example shown, the formula in C6 is:

=TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(B6," ",REPT(" ",100)),100))

Which returns the word “time”.

How this formula works

This formula is an interesting example of a “brute force” approach that takes advantage of the fact that TRIM will remove any number of leading spaces.

Working from the inside out, we use the SUBSTITUTE function to find all spaces in the text, and replace each space with 100 spaces:

SUBSTITUTE(B6," ",REPT(" ",100))

So, for example, with the text string “one two three” the result is going to look like this:

one----------two----------three

With hyphens representing spaces for readability. Keep in mind that there will be 100 spaces between each word.

Next, the RIGHT function extracts 100 characters, starting from the right. The result will look like this:

-------three

Finally, the TRIM function removes all leading spaces, and returns the last word.

Note: We are using 100 arbitrarily because that should be a big enough number to handle very long words. If you have some odd situation with super long words, bump this number up as needed.

Handling inconsistent spacing

If the text you are working with has inconsistent spacing (i.e. extra spaces between words, extra leading or trailing spaces, etc.) This formula won’t work correctly. To handle this situation, add an extra TRIM function inside the substitute function like so:

=TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(B6)," ",REPT(" ",100)),100))

This will normalize all spaces before the main logic runs.

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

  • Complete List of Excel Logical Functions, References and Examples
  • IFS function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • IFNA function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • How to use Excel TRUE Function
  • How to use Excel XOR Function

Date Time

  • Get project end date in Excel
  • Calculate date overlap in days in Excel
  • Display the current date in Excel
  • Add decimal hours to time in Excel
  • Pad week numbers with zeros in Excel

Grouping

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

General

  • Customize Ribbon In Excel
  • How to get random value from list or table in Excel
  • How to calculate percentage of total in Excel
  • Count cells less than in Excel
  • Check if range contains a value not in another range in Excel
© 2025 xlsoffice . All Right Reserved. | Teal Smiles | Abbreviations And Their Meaning