This will extract the last "word" in a cell:

=TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A1)," ",REPT(" ",255)),255))

Note that the result is a *TEXT* string even if the last "word" in the cell
is a number. If your numbers can contain leading 0s then you'll need to
extract them as text in order to retain the leading 0s.

--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP


"novastar" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I have a column of cells which are in any of the following formats:

x #
x x #
x x x #

where x could be any number of characters (a-z or A-Z) either upper or
lower
case.
# could be a 1,2 or 3 digit number 0-9

I generally have to post process this file in UNIX before I import it into
excel and do some modifications.

Is there an easier way to do this in Excel? I don't mind copying the
column
and post processing one column to retain numbers and another column to
retain
text.

--
novastar