Excel 2024: Text Before or After a Specific Delimiter

The new TEXTBEFORE and TEXTAFTER functions debuted on March 16, 2022 for Microsoft 365 Insiders. These functions isolate the text before or after a specific delimiter.

The function syntax requires some text and the delimiter. Optional arguments: instance_num for which delimiter, match_mode for case sensitive, match_end prevents an #N/A if the delimiter is not found. TEXTBEFORE("Cher"," ") returns #N/A. =TEXTBEFORE("Cher"," ",,,1) returns Cher.

Note the third argument lets you specify which delimiter. If you use a negative number here, it counts from the right edge of the cell. The formula in F5 finds the last word in a phrase by using -1 as the value for N.