How to split text at first space in Google Sheets

Let’s say you have a full name ‘Marty P McFly’ and you want to split it into a ‘first name’ column and an ‘everything else’ column.

If you use Google Sheets built in Data > Split text to columns function it would split into 3 rows, Marty, P, McFly.

Here is how you can split at the first space character only.

You get everything before the space (or any delimiter you put between the quotation marks):

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

And you get everything after the space (or anything you put in quotation marks) with this:

=RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-FIND(" ",A1))

This works in Excel as well.