3 ways to remove spaces between words / numbers in Excel cells
3 quick ways to remove extra spaces between words or delete all spaces from Excel cells. You can use trim formula, Excel Find & replace or special Excel add-in to clean up cells' content.
When you paste data from an external source to an Excel spreadsheet (plain text reports, numbers from web pages, etc.), you are likely to get extra spaces along with important data. There can be leading and trailing spaces, several blanks between words and thousand separators for numbers.
Consequently, your table looks disorderly and becomes difficult to use. It may be a challenge to find a customer in the Name column since you search for "John Doe" which has no excess spaces between the names while the way it looks in your table is "John Doe". Or numbers can't be summed up, and again extra blanks are the ones to blame.
In this article you'll find how to clean up your data.
Trim blanks between words to 1, remove trailing / leading spaces
For example, you have a table with 2 columns. In the column Name, the first cell contains "John Doe" written correctly without excess spaces. All other cells have extra blanks between the first and the last names. At the same time these cells have irrelevant blanks before and after the full names known as leading and trailing spaces. The second column is called Length and shows the number of symbols in each name:
Use the Trim formula to remove extra spaces
Excel has the Trim formula to use for deleting extra spaces from text. Below you can find the steps showing how to use this option:
- Add the helper column to the end of your data. You can name it "Trim".
- In the first cell of the helper column (C2), enter the formula to trim excess spaces
=TRIM(A2)
- Copy the formula across the other cells in the column. Feel free to use some tips from Enter the same formula into all selected cells at a time.
- Replace the original column with the one that has the cleaned data. Select all cells in the helper column and press Ctrl + C to copy data to clipboard.
Now pick the first cell in the original column and press Shift + F10 or the menu button
. Then just press V.
- Remove the helper column.
That's it! We deleted all excess blanks with the help of the formula trim(). Unfortunately, it's a bit time-consuming, especially if your spreadsheet is rather big.
Note: If after using the formula you still see extra spaces (the last cell on the screenshot), please have a look at If the TRIM Function Doesn't Work
Using Find & Replace to remove extra spaces between words
This option needs fewer steps, but allows only deleting excess spaces between words. Leading and trailing spaces will also be trimmed to 1, but will not be removed.
- Select one or several columns with the data to delete spaces between words.
- Press Ctrl + H to get the "Find and Replace" dialog box.
- Press the Space bar twice in the Find What field and once in Replace With
- Click on the "Replace all" button, and then press Ok to close Excel confirmation dialog.
- Repeat step 4 until you see the message "We couldn't find anything to replace." :)
3 clicks to neat data with Cell Cleaner add-in
If you often import data to Excel from external sources and spend much time polishing up your tables, check out Cell Cleaner add-in for Excel.
This helpful tool will clean data imported from web or any other external source. It removes leading and trailing spaces, excess blanks between words, non-breaking spaces, line breaks, non-printing symbols and other unwanted characters. This add-in also converts words to UPPER, lower or Proper Case. And if you need to change text numbers back to number format and delete apostrophes, this will not be a problem.
- Download and install Cell Cleaner add-in for Excel.
- Select the range in your table where you want to remove excess spaces. For new tables I usually press Ctrl + A to process all columns in a go.
- Go to Ablebits Data tab and click on the Trim Spaces icon
- The Cell Cleaner pane will open on the left side of your worksheet. Just select the needed checkboxes, click the Trim button and enjoy your perfectly cleaned table.
Isn't it faster than with the two previous tips? If you always deal with data processing, this tool will save you hours of precious time.
Remove all spaces between numbers
Suppose, you have a workbook with numbers where the digits (thousands, millions, billions) are separated with spaces. Thus Excel sees numbers as text and no math operation can be performed.
The easiest way to get rid of excess spaces is using the standard Excel Find & Replace option:
- Press Ctrl + Space to select all cells in a column.
- Press Ctrl + H to open the "Find & Replace" dialog box.
- Press Space bar in the Find What field and make sure the "Replace with" field is empty.
- Click on the "Replace all" button, and then press Ok. Voila! All spaces are removed.
Using formula to remove all spaces
You may need to delete all blanks, like in a formula chain. To do this, you can create a helper column and enter the formula: =SUBSTITUTE(A1," ","")
Here A1 is the first cell of the column with numbers or words where all spaces must be deleted.
Then follow the steps from the part using formula to remove extra spaces between words to 1
156 Responses to "3 ways to remove spaces between words / numbers in Excel cells"
Just wanted to give my thanks. That SUBSTITUTE command just saved 2 days of data inputting in a 2000 rows spreadsheet.
Is there a formula or a function that can be placed into a cell in excel that will automatically restrict space entery, at the time that data is being entered, to 1 space between characters.
Also how would I lock the formulas in cells, so they cannot be changed but allow data entery into the cell.
Many thanks
You can lock cells easily enough. Just right click the cell (or group of cells) and select format cells. Go to the protection tab and check the locked box. Note by default ALL cells are typically set. So really you have to unlock the cells you want to be able to change.
After you've made your sections go to file -> protect workbook. You can select a workbook, sheet whatever... once you've done that the cells will not be changeable unless you go back and undo the protection again via file -> protect. Optionally you can put a password on the protection to keep users out of modifications.
I can still see trailing spaces on my spreadsheets after removing them via Find and replace method. Please help
I had the same issue. Here is what u can do, select (highlight) the "space" after the data and copy (ctrl+c). Then in find and replace, paste (ctrl+v) the "space" that u have copied into the "Find What" and leave the "Replace With" empty.
Good Luck!
IG:Mokhschild
Brilliant, just fixed my problems too! Seems the "spaces" weren't spaces
Excellent! It helped a lot. Thanks, thanks...
Super, thanks!
Thank you as this thread just fixed my problems. I would be interested to know what it was that caused that pseudo-space as it was clearly a space to me.
How to remove spaces in excel
Ex: i have an excel sheet which is in 10 thousand phone numbers in a sheet but the sheet having more spaces.spaces means not a front space and back space,only space from up or above space
like phone number above space and number like this 9999999999,how to remove above space
Space
9999999999----> phone number
Please tell me the formula
Find and replace then press CTRL+J on replace then click the Replace All button.
=SUBSTITUTE(C13," ","")
625 749.41
2 260 216.41
570 246.96
308 608.25
2 084.46
42 840.00
206 271.99
772 026.85
26 735.61
1 493 364.26
193 150.50
how do I convert these to numbers
625 749.41
2 260 216.41
570 246.96
308 608.25
2 084.46
42 840.00
206 271.99
772 026.85
26 735.61
1 493 364.26
193 150.50
Follow same process as explained earlier
This article saved me alot of time and frustration.
1. select the whole column or the cell you want to convert to numbers
2. Right click and then press "Format Cells"
3. click on "Numbers" and adjust the number of decimals you want in the 'Decimal Places'
2415927226.30 how to remove top space??
37820-55C -D250M1
How can i remove space b/w 55c to hyphen with a formula
pls suggest any formula below are more code
37820-55C -D250M1
37820-55C -D550M1
37820-55C -D850M1
37820-55C -N040M1
37820-55C -N210M1
37820-55C -N550M1
37820-55C -N650M1
37820-55C -N710M1
37820-5V6 -D810M1
37820-5XJ -E110M1
37820-5XJ -E210M1
37820-5XJ -E511M1
37820-5XJ -N010M1
37820-5XJ -N110M1
37820-5XJ -N510M1
37820-5XJ -N610M1
Thanks
Search "55C -" Then replace all with "55C-"
This will save me a huge problem from my boss. Huge data supplied came with spaces between phone numbers and we needed to contact them via SMS. Thanks in advance
"
111013491504"
"
111013491515"
"
123016013840"
"
111013491504"
"
1029232644"
"
1029207094"
"
1029183115"
"
1029212005"
"
1029211950"
how can remove this space
A very handy way to remove spaces. Thanks so much, and keep it up.
5703.10.10 How to i convert word foramt (Any Fromulas??)
Thanks a lot. It helped me tons. Cheers!!!
THANKS FOR THE SOLUTION
FIND & REPLACE IS BEST WAY
Thanks for sharing the skills. It is really helpful