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TEXTBEFORE

Text & cleanup

Grab everything before a delimiter — first names, street numbers, the local part of an email.

Difficulty

Amateur
Excel file

1What is it?

TEXTBEFORE returns the piece of a text string that sits before a delimiter you name — a space, a comma, an @, anything. It's the modern, readable replacement for the old LEFT(…, FIND(…)) contortion: give it the text and the marker to stop at, and it hands back the part in front. You can ask for the first occurrence or count from the end, and give it a fallback for when the delimiter isn't there. Microsoft 365 / Excel 2021+.

2What it looks like

TEXTBEFORE(text, delimiter, [instance_num], [match_mode], [match_end], [if_not_found])
text
The string to pull from (a cell like a full name or address).
delimiter
The marker to stop before — " " for a space, ", " for a comma, "@" for an email.
[instance_num]
Which occurrence to stop at — 1 = the first (default); a negative counts from the end.
[if_not_found]
What to return when the delimiter isn't in the text (avoids a #N/A). It's the last argument.

3When you use it

  • Split a first name off a "First Last" column.
  • Take the local part of an email — everything before the @.
  • Pull the street number that sits before the first space in an address.

4See it in action

Change the inputs — the formula and result update live. Prefer the real thing? Download the Excel file and open it in Excel.

Start simple: first name · 1 of 2

Pull everything before the first space. Edit the name below — B2 holds it.

C2
fx
=TEXTBEFORE(B2, " ")Jane
ABC
1FieldValueResult
2Full nameJane DoeJane

The lime cell holds the formula — click it (or any cell) to see its contents in the bar above, just like Excel. Edit the blue cells to watch it recompute.

5Common errors

#N/AThe delimiter isn't in the text and no fallback was given.

Fix: Add the if_not_found argument (the last one) — e.g. the original text, or "".

#NAME?You're on a version without TEXTBEFORE.

Fix: Needs Microsoft 365 or Excel 2021+. Otherwise use LEFT(text, FIND(delimiter, text) - 1).

#VALUE!instance_num is 0.

Fix: Use 1 for the first occurrence, or a negative number to count from the end.

6Better functions & alternatives

  • TEXTAFTER — The mirror image — everything after the delimiter instead of before it.
  • TEXTSPLIT — Split into all the pieces at once when there's more than one delimiter.
  • LEFT + FIND — The pre-365 pattern: LEFT(text, FIND(delimiter, text) - 1).

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