how to extract last word in cell excel for mac

Since the position of the space character would be between the first and the last name, once we have the position of the space character, we can use that to extract everything to the right of it (which would be the last name)īut how many characters from the right should it extract? The above formula uses the FIND function to get the position of the space character in the name. Let me quickly explain how this formula works. Suppose you have a data set as shown below where you have the first name and the last name in column A, and you only want to extract the last name from it. To make sure there are no trailing spaces, you can use the TRIM formula (read – how to remove trailing spaces in Excel) Extract Last Name Using Formulas (When you Have Only First and Last name) In case there is a space character after the last name, doing the above Find and Replace operation would remove everything from the cell. Note: For this method to work you need to make sure that there are no trailing spaces in your data. So when I ask it to find an asterisk followed by the space character, it will find the last space character in the cell and everything before that space character would be considered a part of the asterisk.Īnd when I replace it with a blank, everything before the last space character is removed. In the ‘Find what’ field in the Find and Replace dialog box, I have used an asterisk sign (*) followed by a space character.Īsterisk is a wild card character that represents any number of characters in Excel. The only condition is that the last name should be at the end of the name For example, if you have names that may or may not have a middle name/initial, or may have a prefix such as Mr or Ms. This will return everything to the left of the space.The above method would also work in case you have an inconsistent names dataset. By combining LEFT with the SEARCH function, we can return everything to the left of the space. As you can see in our dataset above, we have cells with one-, two-, and three-character numbers, so we'll need to return the leftmost one, two, or three characters from the cells.

The main function we'll be using here is LEFT, which returns the leftmost characters from a cell. What we assume here is that a space separates the number and text, though the method also works for any other delimiter. This method is a bit cumbersome, but works very well on small datasets. Extract a Number or Text From a Delimited String Note: Cells formatted as text will not automatically emerge with a number formatting (or vice versa), meaning you might still have to convert these cells as described above. You can even create a number of splits that way. If you only have one- and two-digit numbers, the Fixed Width option can be useful too, as it will only split off the first two or three characters of the cell.

How to extract last word in cell excel for mac