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: Excel table with leading and trailing spaces, spaces between words

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:

  1. Add the helper column to the end of your data. You can name it "Trim".
  2. In the first cell of the helper column (C2), enter the formula to trim excess spaces =TRIM(A2) Excel trim formula delete spaces
  3. 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.
  4. 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 menu keyboard button. Then just press V. Replace the original column with the one that has the extra spaces removed

  5. 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. Remove spaces between words to 1, remove leading and trailing spaces

    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.

  1. Select one or several columns with the data to delete spaces between words.
  2. Press Ctrl + H to get the "Find and Replace" dialog box.
  3. Press the Space bar twice in the Find What field and once in Replace With
  4. Click on the "Replace all" button, and then press Ok to close Excel confirmation dialog. Use Excel Find & Replace to remove extra spaces between words
  5. Repeat step 4 until you see the message "We couldn't find anything to replace." :)

3 clicks to neat data with Trim Spaces tool

If you often import data to Excel from external sources and spend much time polishing up your tables, the Trim Spaces tool will clean data imported from the web or any other external source. It removes leading and trailing spaces, excess blanks between words, non-breaking spaces, and line breaks.

To remove all extra spaces in your worksheet, including excess paces between words, this is what you need to do:

  1. Download and install a trial version of Ultimate Suite for Excel.
  2. 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.
  3. Go to Ablebits Data tab and click on the Trim Spaces icon. Click on the Trim Spaces icon to run the tool.
  4. The add-in's 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. All extra spaces are trimmed.

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. Excel cells with numbers where the digits are separated with spaces

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. Remove all spaces between numbers

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 Using formula to remove all spaces between numbers

Video: how to remove spaces in Excel



18 comments

  1. If you have a phone number in format 0X XXX XXX XXX, how do you remove spaces without dropping the zero at the start?

  2. I have copied a table from outlook & there having some junk characters which are looks like space but not space actually.

    All ways for clean the value column are done, number format also applied but still calculation not possible.

    can you please support for the problem.

  3. I have an excel sheet which is received from my bank but amount column having spaces in start of the numbers i put the formula of SUBTITUTE and TRIM but cannot sum of total value of amount by selecting of column.

  4. 12132637
    12132632
    12132431
    12130179

    how can I delete/remove these spaces, that were copied from Outlook.
    I have applied all aforementioned methods however could not get thru.

  5. when i remove a space in a phone number e.g 087 9876543 i am getting 879876543- the space is gone but so is the initial 0. any fix

    1. Hello!
      You didn't say how you removed the space from the number. If you use the SUBSTITUTE function (see example above), the result will be the text "0879876543".
      The same result is obtained using Ultimate Suite for Excel: Ablebits Data - Remove Characters.
      This tool is available as a part of our Ultimate Suite for Excel that you can install in a trial mode and use for free: https://www.ablebits.com/files/get.php?addin=xl-suite&f=free-trial

  6. How can I trim spaces from "selected cells" (not an entire column) - I have a spreadsheet where I only want to trim spaces from selected cells, within one column, but not all. Is there a way of selecting the cells, by using CTRL + select, etc., without removing spaces from non-selected cells?

    1. Hello!
      We have a tool that can solve your task in a couple of clicks.
      The way you are talking about is possible if you use Ablebits Data - Trim Spaces.

      This tool is available as a part of our Ultimate Suite for Excel that you can install in a trial mode and use for free: https://www.ablebits.com/files/get.php?addin=xl-suite&f=free-trial

      Your way to remove spaces is not possible with standard Excel tools. If you are using the TRIM function that only works on one cell, then apply it only to the desired cells. If you use "Find and Replace", then with the button Find Next, skip individual cells.

  7. I have this information in one cell (column A)
    VALLEJO - A52
    I need to delete - A52 from column A and copy the A52 into column B.
    So this is the final product
    A52 (Column B) Vallejo (Column A)

  8. In my excel i don't have Ablebits Data option please suggest how to get it.

    1. Hello, Girish,

      Please note that the Ablebits tab will appear in your Excel Ribbon once you install our software. If you want to use our Trim Spaces add-in to remove extra spaces from your worksheet, feel free to install a fully functional trial version of Ablebits Ultimate Suite for Excel and see if the tools work for you.

  9. Dear All,

    Kindly help me into provide a formula for the below case.
    I need to delete space after number.
    581086
    581086
    581086

    1. Dear Ahamed,
      Thank you for your question.

      Please note that you can remove extra spaces using the Trim formula. However, our Trim Spaces add-in can help you solve this task faster and easier. It is available as a part of our Text Toolkit that contains 8 useful add-ins to manage text data in Excel (remove extra spaces, substrings and non-printable characters, change case, split cells, etc.).

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