Get First Word in Excel & Google Sheets
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This tutorial will demonstrate how to extract the first word from a cell in Excel & Google Sheets.
Extract First Word From a Text
To extract the first word from a cell, we can use a formula containing the LEFT and FIND functions.
=LEFT(B3,FIND(" ", B3)-1)
Let’s delve into the more details of the functions used in the above formula.
The FIND Function
We used the FIND function to get the position of the first occurrence of space in the text. By subtracting 1 from this, we can calculate the position of the last letter in the first word.
=FIND(" ",B3)-1
The LEFT Function
The LEFT Function will extract a certain number of characters from the string, starting from the left. Inputting the result from the FIND Function, gives us the first word:
=LEFT(B3,C3)
Error Handling
If the cell only has one word, the formula will return the #VALUE error.
So to prevent the formula from returning an error, we can use the following two options using:
The IFERROR Function
Surround the formula with the IFERROR Function.
=IFERROR(LEFT(B3,FIND("-",B3)-1),B3)
The IFERROR function performs a calculation. If the calculation results in an error, it returns another value (or calculation). Above, the “iferror” value is the original text string.
Simpler Way
Another way to prevent errors is by adding an additional space to the second argument of the FIND function, with ampersand operator, like this:
=LEFT(B3,FIND(" ",B3&" ")-1)
Now the FIND function will always find a space because we’ve appended a space to the end of each string of text.
Non-Space Separators
If the text string is not separated by space but from a different delimiting character, then by simply changing the value of the first argument in the FIND function with that delimiting character, we’ll get the first word from the text.
=LEFT(B3,FIND("-",B3&" ")-1)
Get Last Word
Extracting the last word from a string of text is more complicated. One option is to use a formula like this:
=TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(B3," ",REPT(" ",LEN(B3))),LEN(B3)))
Extract First Word In Google Sheets
The formula to extract the first word from a text works exactly the same in Google Sheets as in Excel:
