Pulling a value from a string

Hello!

I created a macro that opens a page as an excel sheet, grabs data from it, and inserts it into a cell.
My problem is that one of the cells has an abundance of data that I don't need.

The data that it puts into the cell looks like this: 0849940222,* Bill Myers ,* Thomas Nelson,*1997-10-02
The only thing I need is the first name that shows up.
The number at the beginning is always the same length, so I thought about using a trim function for that, but since names are not always the same length, I have no idea how to do the other end. Maybe get the value for commas and delete everything before the first and after the second...
I also don't know how to do that in VBA.
Any help would be appreciated!
Cheers!

(The data is the ISBN, Author, Publisher, and Date released)

Originally Posted by Ataraxicatom

Hello!

I created a macro that opens a page as an excel sheet, grabs data from it, and inserts it into a cell.
My problem is that one of the cells has an abundance of data that I don't need.

The data that it puts into the cell looks like this: 0849940222,* Bill Myers ,* Thomas Nelson,*1997-10-02
The only thing I need is the first name that shows up.
The number at the beginning is always the same length, so I thought about using a trim function for that, but since names are not always the same length, I have no idea how to do the other end. Maybe get the value for commas and delete everything before the first and after the second...
I also don't know how to do that in VBA.
Any help would be appreciated!
Cheers!

(The data is the ISBN, Author, Publisher, and Date released)

Use the text to columns function in the Data tab of excel 2010. Select a comma as the delimiter. Then use this formula on the resulting parsed strings:

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Where Cell is the location of the parsed string such as A1 or B2, etc. that contains the first name.

Thanks for the quick replies, but I just needed a nudge. Using Judgeh59's suggestion, I created a simple string trimmer that does exactly what I needed:

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It finds the first comma, deletes all the characters up to and including the comma, then finds the second comma and deletes everything after it. It also removed the comma. Thanks guys!