Suppose you have a name like John Doe Smith in Cell A1. You want to extract the last name from the string.
1. Formula Way
Put following formula
=TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(A1," ",REPT(" ",LEN(A1))),LEN(A1)))
2. Manual Way
Manual way is very handy when you have a large data set.
1. Select your column
2. CTRL+H
3. In Find What: box, put "* " without quotes (this is asterisk followed by a space character)
4. Replace All
5. You have only last name now.