Excel Formula: Extract first line of cell

In sometimes, there are several lines of contents in one Excel cell, if you just want to extract first line of contents into another cell, you can use a formula combined with LEFT function and SEARCH function.

Generic formula:

LEFT(txt, SEARCH(CHAR(10), txt)-1)

Arguments

Txt: the cell contents you want to extract first line from.

Remark

If there is blank or no char(10)(line break) in the text, it returns error value #VALUE!.

How this formula work

To extract first line from cell C3, please use below formula:

=LEFT(C3, SEARCH(CHAR(10), C3)-1)

Press Enter key.

Explanation

CHAR(10): the line break.

SEARCH function finds the starting position of a character or text string in a given text. Here the formula SEARCH(CHAR(10), C3) finds the starting position of CHAR, returns 8.

LEFT function extracts text from left side of a text based on the given position. The formula =LEFT(C3, SEARCH(CHAR(10), C3)-1) can be seen as =LEFT(C3, 8-1), extracts 7 characters from left side of cell C3, returns “Combine”.

Sample File

Click to download sample file

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Relative Formulas

• Extract last line of cell
• Trim Text To N Words
  Here introduces the formula to extract n words from left side of a text string.
• Split sentence into words
  This tutorial provides formulas to separate words of sentence into separated columns.
• Split dollars and cents
  To split dollars and cents into two columns with formulas in Excel.

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Relative Functions

• LEFT function
  Extract text from left side.
• SEARCH function
  Find a string within another string, and returns the starting position of the string inside another one.
• IF function
  Test for conditions.
• MID function
  Extract part of text from a cell value based on the location and length.