Luc, brilliant! I can change the number of words I want easily by just changing the instance.

Roger, you said it. I played with the formula (first one) before you posted. I copied and pasted it and there was no problem whatsoever i.e. I got the correct result. Just because it was so smooth, I didn't even know we were supposed to substitute one space with two spaces. At this point, I had not figured out the logic yet. I only found out about the double spaces when I tried to remove some spaces in the formula. I deleted one space between double quotes thinking that it was an extra space and I got #VALUE error. When I finally sorted out everything (including the logic), I decided to make the double spaces more visible by changing it to " *". Of course, I didn't get the right result. It stopped after the first word. Please confirm that " *" is treated as wildcard. Now, I am going to use " ^" instead of double spaces purely for visibility reasons. Does anyone see a problem with my change?

Appreciate guidance.

Epinn

"Roger Govier" wrote in message ...
Hi Luc

An excellent solution, but because of text wrapping in the posting,
anybody copying and pasting the formula may get a problem.

In both of the Substitute terms,
it is a single space " " that is substituted by a double space " "

When I copied and pasted, it somehow dropped one of the double spaces in
the first term, and of course this returned the whole of the text from
cell A1.

--
Regards

Roger Govier


"PapaDos" wrote in message
...
=LEFT( TRIM( A1 ), IF( ISERR( SEARCH( " ", SUBSTITUTE( TRIM( A1 ), "
", "
", 3 ) ) ), LEN( A1 ), SEARCH( " ", SUBSTITUTE( TRIM( A1 ), " ", "
", 3 ) )
- 1 ) )
--
Regards,
Luc.

"Festina Lente"


"Dinesh" wrote:

Is their a function to extract first 3 words from a text string?

Thanks.

Dinesh Shah