Extracting last names | last word from a multi-word string
The question of how to extract the last name from a combined “first [middle][…] last [suffix]” name string – or the last word from a multi-word string – comes up from time to time. I offer a solution (with caveats) in a reply to a recent support post. My example is name-oriented but could easily be adapted to an arbitrary string. Hope this will save someone some time!
Split First and Last Names
That's a little more difficult… At heart, the formula would be something like this: REPLACE({Name},1,FIND("~",SUBSTITUTE({Name}," ","~",LEN({Name}) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE({Name}," ","")))),"") That's a little hard to suss out at first glance, so let me break it down, back to front: LEN({Name}) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE({Name}," ","")) gets the difference in length between {Name} and {Name} with all spaces stripped. This gives us the index of the last space in the name, which presumably prefaces the las…
