No idea really. Did you copy and paste the formula or did you retype it ?

You might want to try Rick's solution ... should be same result but a neater
way of doing it.


"Daniel- Sydney" wrote in message
...
Trevo

thanks, it works to an extent but the result is merging cells b1 and b2,
b3
and b4 and so on, so the first word in cells a2 and a4, and so on, are not
being copied over.

What have I done wrong?

thanks

"Trevor Shuttleworth" wrote:

One way:

=IF(ISERROR(FIND(" ",A1)),A1,(LEFT(A1,FIND(" ",A1)-1)))

Regards

Trevor


"Daniel- Sydney" wrote in
message
...
Hi

I have Excel 2003 SP2.

I have a spreadsheet with one column, each cell contains several words,
I
need the first word in each cell to be moved into a cell in an adjacent
column.

Can I do this automatically?

thanks