LEFT function

[Guest]

Hello,

What is the formula for obtaining the left-most characters in a phrase up to
the first blank space in that phrase? For example, for the phrase, '01
Summary', or '233 Summary', I only would only want to return '01' or '233',
respectively. I need to know how to read up to the first blank space and
then get the characters to the left of that blank space.

Thanks.

 

[Biff]

Hi!

Try this:

This accounts for cells that may not contain a space and in those cases will
leave the formula cell blank instead of returning an error:

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

If the data you want to apply this to will always contain a space then just
this will work:

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

Biff