Today, I encountered a situation where I had to separate the full names of our customers into the first and last names. The names are comma separated, so I was looking for an Excel formula that can help me extract the last name before the comma and the first name after the comma.

For example, you have the following text in a cell “A1″ and you’d like to extract the text before the comma (the last name):

“Doe, John”

To extract the last name before the comma “Doe” from A1, use one of the following formula:

=LEFT(A1,(FIND(",",A1,1)-1))

The result: Doe

To extract the first name after the comma from A1, use one of the following formula:

=MID(A1,FIND(",",A1)+2,256)

The result: John

Not working for you?

Remember to replace A1 with the cell that contains the string of words you want to parse out.