Excel: How to Extract First Name from Full Name


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:

Excel extract first name from cell

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

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