Is it possible for there to be blank cells in the column with your pipe(|)
delimited text? If so, use this...

=LEFT(A1,FIND("|",A1&"|")-1)

One side effect to this... if you have a piece of text without the pipe
symbol in it, the entire text from the cell will be returned.

--
Rick (MVP - Excel)


"ArcticWolf" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I have a text string and would like all the characters before the | symbol
to be returned. The text before the | is varying lengths.

EG
Pears|Apples.........would return Pears
Bananas|Oranges...........would return Bananas

TIA,

AW