Final Friday Fix: September 2022 Challenge

On the final Friday of each month, we are going to set an Excel / Power BI challenge for you to puzzle over so that you can get your “Excel fix”.  Challenge your office colleagues to see who can solve the puzzle quickest.  There are no prizes at this stage: you are playing for bragging rights only!

The Challenge

There may be a time when you are using Excel that you wish to extract a name of a person from a churn of endless text strings that have all sorts of characters that you have never seen or used before. To replicate that experience, we give you a similar challenge here, you can download the question file here.

This month’s challenge is to write a formula to extract the name of a person from a text string.  The result should look like as picture (below):

As always, there are some requirements:

• the formula needs to be within just one column (no “helper” cells)
• this is a formula challenge; no Power Query / Get & Transform or VBA!
• the formula should be dynamic enough when a similar text string is added.

Feel free to use the  attached Excel file to assist you.

Sounds easy?  Then why not have a go?  We’ll publish one solution in Monday’s blog.  Have a great weekend in the meantime!