Jim, thank you for your suggestion. I completely forgot about this
function. It worked well.

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 14:15:03 -0800, "Jim Thomlinson"
wrote:

Assuming that the data is separated by the | character you could just use
Data - Text to Columns and follow the wizard. You want to select delimited
and use the | character when it asks how the file is split.

Chips code is great and if you need an automated way of doing this then
follow his thread. If this is more of a one time or infrequent thing then
text to columns might just do the trick...

HTH

" wrote:

Hello
Windows XP Professional SP2
Office professional 2003 SP1

I have a column of data that has the following contents

contact 1 | contact2 | contact 3

I'd like to select the first contact. Each contact name is different
in size and usually there is a first and last name for each contact.
How do I extract to the first contact from this record?

Thank you
Bob