Formula to truncate a cell's content ?

[Lincoln Six Echo]

Hi,

I have a problem because some cells containing my data are also being used to also store contact information. (The data comes from a 3rd Party Software).

I need to truncate the cells so that only the client name and date are included. The problem is that there is nothing but a space between the good data and the junk ... not even a comma or semicolon ...

The original data is
Doe 19-sep-08 cell: 555-1234
Smith 06-jan-07
Bush 21-oct-07 Florida Number: 555-1244
Wan & Wing 15-jan-08
Johnson & Smith 02-dec-07 555-1234

In red is the data I would need to exclude from the output cell.

The only consistant thing is that the 'junk', if any, is after the date, which is always formatted the same way.

Any idea?

 

[Andrew Poulsom]

This works for your sample data:

=LEFT(A1,FIND("|",SUBSTITUTE(A1,"-","|",2))+2)

 

[Domski]

Maybe:

=LEFT(A1,FIND("-",A1,FIND("-",A1)+1)+2)

Dom

 

[Lincoln Six Echo]

Wow .. thanks so much. Both work exactly as expected.