You can use the following formula in Excel to extract the last 3 words from a cell:

=TEXTAFTER(A2, " ", -3)

This particular formula extracts the last 3 words from cell A2.

The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.

Example: Extract Last 3 Words from Cell in Excel

Suppose we have the following column of phrases in Excel:

Suppose we would like to extract the last 3 words from each cell in column A.

We can type the following formula into cell B2 to do so:

=TEXTAFTER(A2, " ", -3)

We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B:

Column B now contains the last 3 words from each cell in column A.

Note: You can replace the value 3 in the formula with any value you’d like to instead extract the last n words.

How This Formula Works

Recall the formula that we used to extract the last 3 words from each cell:

=TEXTAFTER(A2, " ", -3)

TEXTAFTER(text, delimiter, [instance_num], …)

where:

• text: Text to search
• delimiter: Character or substring to extract text after
• instance_num (optional): Instance of delimiter after which to extract text (default is 1)

The first argument specifies that we want to search cell A2.

The second argument specifies that we want to extract text after a space.

The third argument specifies that we would like to extract the text after the third to last space.

By supplying a negative value to this argument, we’re able to search the string starting from the right side.

By using this formula, we are able to extract the last 3 words from a given cell.

Note: You can find the complete documentation for the TEXTAFTER function in Excel .

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Excel: