Excel: How to Extract Filename from Full Path

You can use the following syntax to extract the filename from a full file path in Excel:

=TEXTAFTER(A2, "\", -1)

This particular formula extracts the filename from the full file path in cell A2.

For example, suppose cell A2 contains the following full file path:

C:\Users\bob\Documents\current_data\baseball_data.xlsx

This formula will return:

baseball_data.xlsx

The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.

Example: Extract Filename from Full Path in Excel

Suppose we have the following column of full file paths in Excel:

Suppose we would like to extract only the filename from each file path in column A.

We can type the following formula into cell B2 to do so:

=TEXTAFTER(A2, "\", -1)

We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B:

Excel extract filename from path

Column B now contains just the filename from each full file path in column A.

How This Formula Works

The TEXTAFTER function in Excel extracts all text in a cell after a specific character or substring.

This function uses the following syntax:

TEXTAFTER(text, delimiter, [instance_num], [match_mode], [match_end], [if_not_found])

where:

text: Text to search
delimiter: Character or substring to extract text after
instance_num (optional): Instance of delimiter after which to extract text (default is 1)
match_mode (optional): 0 = case-sensitive (default), 1 = case-insensitive
match_end (optional): Treat end of text as delimiter (disabled by default)
if_not_found (optional): Value to return if delimiter is not found

Recall that we used the following syntax to extract the text after the last space in a cell:

=TEXTAFTER(A2, "\", -1)

By using a value of -1 for the instance_num argument, we were able to specify that we wanted to extract the text after the last instance of a slash.

This is equivalent to extracting just the filename from the path, since the filename occurs after the last slash in the string.

Note: You can find the complete documentation for the TEXTAFTER function in Excel here.