Extracting data from a text string

Hi,

I have a few hundred rows of text in the fomat below:

1.23456 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The “x’s” represent text which is unique to each row. Can someone please tell me what formula I need to extract the number (1.23456) at the start of the string? To complicate things the number may be reported to any number of decimal places, so the formula needs to be able to extract the first block of digits at the start of each row and report it as a number that can be used in calculations.

Thanks!

This formula will extract everything before the first space character:

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

Although the result is still a text string, you can do math on it, Excel is pretty slick about recognizing the string is a usable number. Or you can add +0 to the end to get an actual number.

=LEFT(A1,FIND(" ",A1)-1)+0