How to remove characters/text from string in Excel

The article looks at how to quickly remove part of text from Excel cells using formulas and inbuilt features.

In this tutorial, we will look at the most common cases of removing characters in Excel. Want to delete specific text from multiple cells? Or maybe strip the first or last character in a string? Or perhaps remove only a specific occurrence of a given character? Whatever your task is, you will find more than one solution for it!

• How to remove specific characters
  • Delete specific character from multiple cells
  • Remove certain character from string
  • Delete multiple characters at once
• How to remove part of text string
  • Delete text from multiple cells with Find & Replace
  • Remove part of text from a cell with a formula
• Remove Nth occurrence of specific character
• Delete first character from string
• Remove last character from string
• Trim spaces before and after text
• Special tools to remove characters or text in Excel

How to remove specific character in Excel

If your goal is to eradicate a certain character from Excel cells, there are two easy ways to do it - the Find & Replace tool and a formula.

Remove character from multiple cells using Find and Replace

Bearing in mind that removing a character is nothing else than replacing it with nothing, you can leverage Excel's Find and Replace feature to accomplish the task.

1. Select a range of cells where you want to remove a specific character.
2. Press Ctrl + H to open the Find and Replace dialog.
3. In the Find what box, type the character.
4. Leave the Replace with box empty.
5. Click Replace all.

As an example, here's how you can delete the # symbol from cells A2 through A6.

As the result, the hash symbol is removed from all of the selected cells at once, and a pop-up dialog informs you how many replacements have been made:

Remove certain character from string using a formula

To eliminate a specific character from any position is a string, use this generic SUBSTITUTE formula:

In our case, the formula takes this form:

=SUBSTITUTE(A2, "#", "")

Basically, what the formula does is that it processes the string in A2 and replaces each hash symbol (#) with an empty string ("").

Enter the above formula in B2, copy it down through B6, and you will get this result:

Please pay attention that SUBSTITUTE always returns a text string, even if the result contains only numbers like in cells B2 and B3 (notice the default left alignment typical for text values).

If you want the result to be a number, then wrap the above formula in the VALUE function like this:

=VALUE(SUBSTITUTE(A2, "#", ""))

Or you can perform some math operation that does not change the original value, say add 0 or multiply by 1:

=SUBSTITUTE(A2, "#", "")*1

Delete multiple characters at once

To remove multiple characters with one formula, simply nest SUBSTITUTE functions one into another.

For example, to get rid of a hash symbol (#), forward slash (/) and backslash (\), here's the formula to use:

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2, "#",""), "/", ""), "\", "")

How to remove certain text from Excel cell

The two methods we used for removing a single character can handle a sequence of characters equally well.

Delete text from multiple cells

To remove specific text from each cell in a selected range, press Ctrl + H to display the Find and Replace dialog, and then:

• Enter the unwanted text in the Find what box.
• Leave the Replace with box blank.
  

Clicking the Replace All button will do all the replacements in one go:

Remove certain text from cell using a formula

To remove part of a text string, you again use the SUBSTITUTE function in its basic form:

For example, to delete the substring "mailto:" from cell A2, the formula is:

=SUBSTITUTE(A2, "mailto:", "")

This formula goes to B2, and then you drag it down across as many rows as needed:

How to remove Nth instance of a specific character

In situation when you want to delete a certain occurrence of a particular character, define the last optional argument of the SUBSTITUTE function. In the generic formula below, instance_num determines which instance of the specified character should be replaced with an empty string:

For example:

To eradicate the 1^st slash in A2, your formula is:

=SUBSTITUTE(A2, "/", "", 1)

To strip the 2^nd slash character, the formula is:

=SUBSTITUTE(A2, "/", "", 2)

How to remove first character

To remove the first character from the left side of a string, you can use one of the following formulas. Both do the same thing, but in different ways.

Translated into a human language, the formula says: in the specified cell, take 1 character (num_chars) from the 1^st position (start_num), and replace it with an empty string ("").

Here, we subtract 1 character from the total length of the string, which is calculated by the LEN function. The difference is passed to RIGHT for it to extract that number of characters from the end.

For instance, to remove the first character from A2, the formulas go as follows:

=REPLACE(A2, 1, 1, "")

=RIGHT(A2, LEN(A2) - 1)

The screenshot below shows the REPLACE formula. The RIGHT LEN formula will deliver exactly the same results.

To delete any n characters from the beginning of a string, please see How to remove characters from left in Excel.

How to remove last character

To strip off the last character from the end of a string, the formula is:

The logic is similar to the RIGHT LEN formula from the previous example:

You subtract 1 from the total cell length and serve the difference to the LEFT function, so it can pull that many characters from the beginning of the string.

For instance, you can remove the last character from A2 using this formula:

=LEFT(A2, LEN(A2) - 1)

To delete any n characters from the end of a string, please see How to remove characters from right in Excel.

Remove text after a specific character

To delete everything after a given character, the generic formula is:

The logic is quite simple: the SEARCH function calculates the position of the specified character and passes it over to the LEFT function, which brings the corresponding number of characters from the beginning. Not to output the delimiter itself, we subtract 1 from the SEARCH result.

For example, to remove text after a colon (:), the formula in B2 is:

=LEFT(A2, SEARCH(":", A2) -1)

For more formula examples, please see Delete text before or after a certain character.

How to remove spaces before and after text in Excel

In text processors such as Microsoft Word, a whitespace before text is sometimes added intentionally to create a balanced and elegant flow for the reader's eye. In spreadsheets programs, leading and trailing spaces may creep unnoticed and cause a lot of problems. Luckily, Microsoft Excel has a special function, named TRIM, to delete extra spaces.

The formula to remove excess spaces from cells is as simple as this:

=TRIM(A2)

Where A2 is your original text string.

As you can see in the image below, it deletes all spaces before text, after text and between words/substrings except for a single space character.

If this simple formula does not work for you, then most likely there are some non-breaking spaces or non-printing characters in your worksheet.

To get rid of them, convert non-breaking spaces into regular spaces with the help of SUBSTITUTE:

SUBSTITUTE(A2, CHAR(160), " ")

Where 160 is the code number of a non-breaking space character ( ).

Additionally, use the CLEAN function to eliminate non-printable characters:

CLEAN(SUBSTITUTE(A2, CHAR(160), " "))

Nest the above construction in the TRIM function, and you'll get a perfect formula to remove spaces before/after text as well as non-breaking spaces and non-printing characters:

=TRIM(CLEAN(SUBSTITUTE(A2, CHAR(160), " ")))

For more information, please see How to remove spaces in Excel.

Remove characters in Excel with Flash Fill

In simple scenarios, Excel's Flash Fill can do you a favor and remove characters or part of text automatically based on the pattern that you provide.

Let's say you have a name and email address in one cell separated by a comma. You want to remove everything after the comma (including the comma itself). To have it done, carry out these steps:

1. Insert a blank column to the right of your source data.
2. In the first cell of a newly added column, type the value you want to keep (name in our case).
3. Start typing the value in the next cell. As soon as Excel determines the pattern, it will show a preview of data to be filled in the below cells following the same pattern.
4. Press the Enter key to accept the preview.

Done!

Special tools to remove characters or text in Excel

This final section presents our own solutions for removing text from Excel cells. If you love finding simple ways to handle complex challenges, you'll enjoy the handy tools included with Ultimate Suite.

On the Ablebits Data tab, in the Text group, there are three options for removing characters from Excel cells:

• Specific characters and substrings
• Characters in a certain position
• Duplicate characters

To delete a specific character or substring from selected cells, proceed in this way:

1. Click Remove > Remove Characters.
2. Select the option best suited to your needs.
3. Check or uncheck the Case-sensitive box.
4. Hit Remove.

Below are a few examples that cover the most typical scenarios.

Remove specific character

To remove a particular character(s) from multiple cells at once, select Remove custom characters.

As an example, we are deleting all occurrences of the uppercase letters A and B from the range A2:A4:

Delete a predefined character set

To remove a certain set of characters, select Remove character sets, and then choose one of the following options:

• Non-printing characters­ - strips off any of the first 32 characters in the 7-bit ASCII set (code values 0 through 31) including a tab character, line break, and so on.
• Text characters - removes text and keeps numbers.
• Numeric characters - deletes numbers from alphanumeric strings.
• Symbols & punctuation marks - removes special symbols and punctuation marks such as a period, question mark, exclamation point, comma, etc.
  

Remove part of text

To delete part of a string, choose the Remove a substring option.

For example, to extract usernames from Gmail addresses, we are removing the "@gmail.com" substring:

That's how to remove text and characters from Excel cells. I thank you for reading and look forward to seeing you on our blog next week!

Available downloads

Remove characters in Excel - examples (.xlsm file)
Ultimate Suite - evaluation version (.exe file)

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