Remove duplicates within Excel cell

Question

Say I have the following text string in one single Excel cell:

John John John Mary Mary

I want to create a formula (so no menu functions or VBA, please) that would give me, on another cell

John Mary

How can I do this?

What I've tried so far was search the internet and SO about the issue and all I could find were solutions involving Excel's built-in duplicate removal or something involving countif and the replacement of duplicates for "". I've also taken a look at the list of Excel functions, especially those from the "Text" category, but couldn't find anything interesting, that could be done on one cell.

Solution 1

The answer is here: https://www.extendoffice.com/documents/excel/2133-excel-remove-duplicate-characters-in-string.html

Function RemoveDupes2(txt As String, Optional delim As String = " ") As String
Dim x
'Updateby20140924
With CreateObject("Scripting.Dictionary")
    .CompareMode = vbTextCompare
    For Each x In Split(txt, delim)
        If Trim(x) <> "" And Not .exists(Trim(x)) Then .Add Trim(x), Nothing
    Next
    If .Count > 0 Then RemoveDupes2 = Join(.keys, delim)
End With
End Function

Put the code above in a module

Use =RemoveDupes2(A2,",") A2 contains repeated text separated by , You may change the delimiter

Solution 2

Assuming you'll never have more than two distinct names in a cell, this should work:

=MID(A1&" ",1,FIND(" ",A1&" "))&
 MID(SUBSTITUTE(A1&" ",MID(A1&" ",1,FIND(" ",A1&" ")),"")&" ",1,
 FIND(" ",SUBSTITUTE(A1&" ",MID(A1&" ",1,FIND(" ",A1&" "))&" ","")))

It will show John Mary for all of these:

John John John Mary Mary
John Mary
John Mary John Mary
John Mary Mary
John John Mary

It will show John for all of these:

John
John John
John John John

And it will show nothing if A1 is blank.