If you have list of data with full name and you want to extract first name from that, then you can easily do it with the help of LEFT and FIND functions. How to extract first name from full name in EXCEL Generic Formula to get first name from full name in EXCEL =LEFT(name, FIND("differentiator ", name)-1) Explanation: name refers to the cell which contains full name. differentiator refers to the value which separates first name from the middle name. How this formula helps to extract first name from a name Lets take example to understand this better. =LEFT(A3,FIND(" ",A3)-1) FIND function returns the position of first space character(" ") in the name. To remove the position of space, we are substarting 1. LEFT function takes this input on how many characters to be extracted. In our example, FIND function returns 8. Then we are subtracting 1. So the result is 7. Now LEFT function takes only 7 characters from the left.