How to Remove First / Last Word From Text String in cell?


You might occasionally need to modify the contents of cells by eliminating the first or last word from text strings when working with huge datasets or text-heavy spreadsheets. Excel offers a number of strong capabilities that can make this task simple and effective.

In this lesson, we'll walk you through every step of how to complete this operation using Excel functions. The techniques we'll go through in this article will assist you in achieving your objectives, whether you want to clean up data, extract certain information, or just reorganise text strings. You will be able to confidently use these methods on your own Excel projects at the end of this session, saving time and effort and ensuring data correctness. Learn how to remove the first or final word from text strings in Excel by getting started now!

Remove First / Last Word From Text String

Here we will first get any one of the values using the formula, then use the autofill handle to complete the task. So let us see a simple process to know how you can remove the first or last word from a text string in a cell in Excel.

Step 1

Consider an Excel sheet where you have a list of text strings.

First, to remove the first word, click on an empty cell, in this case cell B2, and enter the formula as =RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-FIND(" ",A2)) and click enter to get the value. In the formula, A2 is the cell containing data.

Empty Cell > Formula > Enter.

Step 2

Then drag down using the autofill handle. Then you will see that the first word will be removed from the strings.

This is how you can remove the first word from strings in Excel.

Note

If you want to remove the last word, use the formula as follows −

=LEFT(TRIM(A2),FIND("~",SUBSTITUTE(A2," ",",LEN(TRIM(A2))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A2)," ","")))-1).

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have used a simple example to demonstrate how you can remove the first or last word from a text string in a cell in Excel to highlight a particular set of data.

Updated on: 07-Sep-2023

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