You should have posted more examples.. Check out whether the below formula
would work for all your cases..I have assumed that you will always have a
numeric value just after the vendor name

=SUBSTITUTE(LEFT(A1,MIN(SEARCH({0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, 9},A1&
"0123456789"))-1),"-",)

--
Jacob


"april" wrote:

i have a cell that is a journal reference. here is an example US POSTMASTER
--1025093-1-July Intl Renewal- Perm. the upper case letters refer to the
vendor. i want to extract only the vendor name from the cell. can't use
find conventions such as find the "--" as the two dashes are not always part
of the cell.

thanks in advance for your help

--
aprilshowers