Editing Contents of entire column in LibreOffice Calc

[jacob.fauber]

Hi everyone! Thanks for the help. Running LibreOffice 4.2.7.2 on Ubuntu 14.04.

I’m new to using Calc. I’ve scraped a whole bunch of information from a website onto a spreadsheet, but unfortunately, I couldn’t get it all to format properly due to the configuration of the website. I’m wondering if there’s a way to manipulate the values easily in LibreOffice Calc.

Here’s the basic issue: Column A consists of a couple thousand cells, all UserIDs. The UserID field contains more information than I’d like it to, seperated by a significant amount of whitespace. I’d like to shorten each.

So the first column looks something like this:

A1: UserID

A2: Leslie Guest

A3: Isaac Member

A4: Julia Administrator

…

A10000: Abe Guest

Note that Guest, Member, etc, could be any text.
I would like it to appear like this:

A1: UserID

A2: Leslie

A3: Isaac

A4: Julia

…

A10000: Abe

And simply have no idea how to run something like that over column A without specifying on each cell by hand, which is obviously impractical.

Anyone got any clues?

[Lupp]

(Deleted!)

[ROSt53]

=LEFT(C17,FIND(" ",C17)) where you need to replace C17 by A2,… and then you can copy the formula down. Note that in the argument of FIND there is a space between the " "

FIND identifies the position of the blank between the name you want and the following information you want to cut out.

I recommend to have a look at the free guides which you can download from http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/documentation/

[jacob.fauber]

Right-o! I was using SEARCH instead of FIND, which was throwing an error. Thank you for the help and the link to the documentation. I’ll read through that a bit more more carefully before posting next time.

[ROSt53]

@jacob.fauber - I am glad you got the solution. Guides are good help. I also use the help file when searching for functions which I don’t now in detail or when don’t know if something exists are not. Good descriptions and examples are give.

If you like you can flag the question as answered. Green check mark.

[karolus]

Hallo

Maybe easy with:
Select Col A and do →→Data→Text in Columns→seperate by [x]space