Extracting last names | last word from a multi-word string

[W_Vann_Hall]

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…

[Justin_Barrett]

Welcome to the community, @Margaret_Pickering1! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: For what it’s worth, the solution above is several years old. There are more efficient ways of doing this using regular expressions. Extracting the last word of a string can be done with this formula:

IF(Name, REGEX_EXTRACT(Name, "[^ ]*$"))

[Margaret_Picke1]

Thanks, that is helpful