Excel: How to Extract Text Between Two Commas

You can use the TEXTBEFORE and TEXTAFTER functions in Excel to extract all text in a cell between two commas.

You can use the following syntax to do so:

=TEXTBEFORE(TEXTAFTER(A2, ","), ",")

This particular example extracts all of the text between the two commas in cell A2.

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

Example: Extract Text Between Two Commas in Excel

Suppose we have the following list of locations in Excel:

Now suppose we would like to extract the state name between the two commas in each cell.

For example, we would like to extract:

And so on.

We can type the following formula into cell B2 to extract the text between the commas in cell A2:

=TEXTBEFORE(TEXTAFTER(A2, ","), ",")

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

Excel extract text between two commas

Column B now contains the text between the commas for each corresponding cell in column A.

Recall the formula that we used to extract the text between the commas in cell A2:

=TEXTBEFORE(TEXTAFTER(A2, ","), ",")

Here is how this formula works:

First, we use the TEXTAFTER function to extract all of the text after the comma in cell A2.

This returns Ohio, United States.

Then, we use the TEXTBEFORE function to extract all of the text before the comma from this remaining text.

This returns Ohio.

Note: If you’d like, you could wrap the TRIM function around this formula to remove any leading or trailing spaces from the resulting text.

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