I'm baffled what your formula has accomplished. It looks like it will take the entire length of A2 and multiply that by 5 as the amount to include in the LEFT formula. Try this assuming the word "merchant" is always in there: =LEFT(A2,SEARCH("merchant",A2)+7) Another method that works in Excel is to use DATA "text to columns" feature. You can just select the entire column and set up the column breaks that make sense. That's what I usually do. | 
Trim a column in a spreadsheet?
