How to extract a first name with a helper column

Let’s take a look.

Excel’s LEFT andRIGHT functions are easy to use when you know how many characters you want to extract.

But what if you want to extract the first name from a full name?

But “5” isn’t going to work for names like Maureen, Charles, or Ann.

FIND is case-sensitive, but it won’t make any difference in this situation.

As you’re free to see, this works.

Each name contains a trailing space.

That’s because the LEFT function is extracting each character up to, and including, the space character.

We can easily fix that by subtracting “1” from the number that FIND returns.

I’ll undo the conversion to “values” and make that change.

Now I can delete the helper column, and the first name formula works just fine.