One way:

=LEFT(A1,MIN(IF(ISNUMBER(FIND(" ",A1)),FIND(" ",A1),8)))



In article ,
Adam Cole <Adam wrote:

I'm using Excel 2003 and need to return the first eight characters from a
cell.

The "Left" function is fine for this but where the first word is less than
eight characters I only want to extract the first word and "left" includes
the start of the second word!

Can anyone help?