You can use the following formulas in Excel to extract the first name from a full name in a cell:
Method 1: Extract First Name (With Spaces)
=LEFT(A2, FIND(" ", A2)-1)
Method 2: Extract First Name (With Commas)
=LEFT(A2, FIND(",", A2)-1)
Both formulas extract the first name from a full name in cell A2.
The following examples show how to use each formula in practice.
Example 1: Extract First Name (With Spaces)
Suppose we have the following dataset in Excel that shows the number of sales by various employees at some company:
Notice that the names in each cell are separated by spaces.
We can use the following formula to extract the first name from each employee:
=LEFT(A2, FIND(" ", A2)-1)
We can type this formula into cell C2, then drag and fill it down to the remaining cells in column C:
Column C now contains the first name of each employee in column A.
Example 2: Extract First Name (With Commas)
Suppose we have the following dataset in Excel that shows the number of sales by various employees at some company:
Notice that the names in each cell are separated by commas.
We can use the following formula to extract the first name from each employee:
=LEFT(A2, FIND(",", A2)-1)
We can type this formula into cell C2, then drag and fill it down to the remaining cells in column C:
Column C now contains the first name of each employee in column A.
Additional Resources
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Excel:
How to Count Frequency of Text in Excel
How to Check if Cell Contains Text from List in Excel
How to Calculate Average If Cell Contains Text in Excel