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.

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.

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Excel: