Remove Leading And Trailing Spaces From Text Excel Formula

Once you’ve removed extra spaces, you can copy the cells with formulas and paste special elsewhere as “values” to get the final text. Video: How to clean text with TRIM and CLEAN

TRIM with CLEAN

If you also need to remove line breaks from cells, you can add the CLEAN function like so: The CLEAN function removes a range of non-printing characters, including line breaks, and returns “cleaned” text. The TRIM function then takes over to remove extra spaces and returns the final text.

Other problematic characters

Note that CLEAN is not able to remove all non-printing characters, notably a non-breaking space, which can be appear in Excel as CHAR(160). By adding the SUBSTITUTE function to the formula, you can remove specific characters. For example, to remove a non-breaking space, you can use:

Dave Bruns

Hi - I’m Dave Bruns, and I run Exceljet with my wife, Lisa. Our goal is to help you work faster in Excel. We create short videos, and clear examples of formulas, functions, pivot tables, conditional formatting, and charts.