How to extract the username from an email address
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3Get the part before the @ — for display names, matching, or de-duplication.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel | =LEFT(A2,FIND("@",A2)-1) | Excel 365: =TEXTBEFORE(A2,"@"). |
| Google Sheets | =LEFT(A2,FIND("@",A2)-1) | Identical; also =REGEXEXTRACT(A2,"^[^@]+"). |
| LibreOffice Calc | =LEFT(A2,FIND("@",A2)-1) | Identical. |
How it works
FIND locates the @ and LEFT keeps everything before it: "ada.lovelace". The companion extraction — the domain after the @ — is covered in the extract-domain-from-email recipe; together they split any address in two. To go further and title-case a name out of the username, chain the sentence-case and substitute-dots-for-spaces patterns: =PROPER(SUBSTITUTE(LEFT(A2,FIND("@",A2)-1),"."," ")) gives "Ada Lovelace".
Verified, not just documented
We ran =LEFT(A2,FIND("@",A2)-1) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned ada.lovelace — exactly the expected result. Every formula here is confirmed by actually executing it.