excel - Extract the last substring from a cell

Question

I have names in a column. I need to split just the last names from that column into another column.

The last name is delimited by a space from the right side.

The contents in cell A2 = Alistair Stevens and I entered the formula in cell B2 (I need 'Stevens' in cell B2)

I tried using the following formulas:

=RIGHT(A2,FIND(" ",A2,1)-1)

=RIGHT(A2,FIND(" ",A2))

Both these formulas work for this cell but when I fill it down / copy and paste it for the cells below it doesn't work. I get the wrong values!!

A3 -> David Mckenzie

B3 -> Mckenzie

Answer 1

This works, even when there are middle names:

=MID(A2,FIND(CHAR(1),SUBSTITUTE(A2," ",CHAR(1),LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2," ",""))))+1,LEN(A2))

If you want everything BUT the last name, check out this answer.

If there are trailing spaces in your names, then you may want to remove them by replacing all instances of A2 by TRIM(A2) in the above formula.

Note that it is only by pure chance that your first formula =RIGHT(A2,FIND(" ",A2,1)-1) kind of works for Alistair Stevens. This is because "Alistair" and " Stevens" happen to contain the same number of characters (if you count the leading space in " Stevens").