How to remove carriage returns (line breaks) from cells in Excel

In this tip you'll find 3 ways to remove carriage returns from Excel cells. You'll also learn how to replace line breaks with other symbols. All solutions work for Excel 365, 2021, 2019, and lower versions.

3 ways to remove carriage returns (line breaks) from your text in Excel

There can be different reasons for line breaks occurring in your text. Usually, carriage returns appear when you copy text from a webpage, get a workbook that already contains line breaks from a customer, or you add them yourself using Alt+Enter.

In any case, what you want to do now is delete carriage returns since they don't let you find a phrase and make column contents look disorganized when you turn on the wrap text option.

Please note that initially the terms "Carriage return" and "Line feed" were used in a typewriter and meant 2 different actions, you can find more at Wiki.

Computers and text processing software were created taking into consideration the typewriter specificities. That's why two different non-printable symbols are used now to indicate line break: "Carriage return" (CR, ASCII code 13) and "Line Feed" (LF, ASCII code 10). Windows uses 2 symbols one by one: CR+LF, and LF for *NIX systems. Be careful: in Excel you can find both variants. If you import data from a .txt or .csv file, you are more likely to find Carriage Return + Line Feed. When you break a line using Alt+Enter , Excel inserts Line Feed only.

In case you get .csv files from a person who uses Linux, Unix, etc., you'll find only Line Feeds again.

All these 3 ways are really quick. Feel free to pick the one that suites you best:

Tip. For your are looking for a solution to the opposite task, then read how to quickly add a line break in Excel cell.

Remove Carriage Returns manually

Pros: the fastest way.

Cons: no any additional features :(.

Please find the steps for eliminating line breaks using Find and Replace:

  1. Select all cells where you want to remove or replace carriage returns. Select all cells where you want to remove or replace carriage returns.
  2. Press Ctrl+H to open the Find & Replace dialog box.
  3. In the Find What field enter Ctrl+J. It will look empty, but you will see a tiny dot.
  4. In the Replace With field, enter any value to replace carriage returns. Usually, it is space to avoid 2 words join accidentally. If all you need is deleting the line breaks, leave the "Replace With" field empty. Eliminating line breaks using Excel Find and Replace
  5. Press the Replace All button and enjoy the result!

Delete line breaks using Excel formulas

Pros: you can use a formula chain / nested formulas for complex cell text processing. For example, it is possible to remove carriage returns and then eliminate excess leading and trailing spaces and those between words.

Or you may need to delete carriage returns to use your text as an argument of another function without changing the original cells. For example, if you want to be able to use the result as an argument of the function =lookup ().

Cons: you'll need to create a helper column and follow many extra steps.

  1. Add the helper column to the end of your data. You can name it "1 line".
  2. In the first cell of the helper column (C2), enter the formula to remove / replace line breaks. Here you can see several helpful formulas for different occasions:
    • Handle both Windows and UNIX carriage return/ line feeds combinations.
      =SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(13),""),CHAR(10),"")
    • The next formula will help you replace line break with any other symbol (comma+space). In this case lines will not join and extra spaces will not appear.
      =TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(13),""),CHAR(10),", ")
    • If you want to remove all nonprintable characters from text, including line breaks:
      =CLEAN(B2)
    Excel formula to delete carriage returns from cells
  3. Copy the formula across the other cells in the column.
  4. Optionally, you can replace the original column with the one where the line breaks were removed:
    • Select all cells in column C and press Ctrl + C to copy the data to clipboard.
    • Now pick the cell B2 and press the Shift + F10 shortcut. Then just press V.
    • Remove the helper column.

VBA macro to get rid of line breaks

Pros: Being created once, can be reused in any workbook.

Cons: you need to have the basic knowledge of VBA.

The VBA macro from the example below deletes carriage returns from all cells in the currently opened worksheet (active worksheet).

Sub RemoveCarriageReturns() Dim MyRange As Range Application.ScreenUpdating = False Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual For Each MyRange In ActiveSheet.UsedRange If 0 < InStr(MyRange, Chr(10)) Then MyRange = Replace(MyRange, Chr(10), "") End If Next Application.ScreenUpdating = True Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic End Sub

If you don't know VBA really well, see How to insert and run VBA code in Excel

Remove carriage returns with Text Toolkit

If you are a lucky user of our Ultimate Suite for Excel, then you do not need to waste time on any of the above manipulations. All it takes is these 3 quick steps:

  1. Select one or more cells where you want to delete line breaks.
  2. On your Excel ribbon, go to the Ablebits Data tab > Text group, and click the Convert button. Ablebits Convert tool for Excel
  3. On the Convert Text pane, select the Convert line break to radio button, type the "replacement" character in the box, and click Convert.

In our example, we are replacing each line break with a space, so you put the mouse cursor in the box and press the Enter key: Replace line breaks with spaces

As the result, you will have a neatly organized table with one-line addresses: Line breaks are removed from the selected cells.

If you are curious to try this and 60 more time-saving tools for Excel, you are welcome to download a trial version of our Ultimate Suite. You will be amazed to discover a-few-clicks solutions for the most challenging and tedious tasks in Excel!

Video: How to remove line breaks in Excel



Table of contents

158 comments

  1. I want to replace char(10) with space in above VBA Script. please help. I don't want to use formula it will not fixable to handle long data

  2. Very Helpful.

    However, TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(13),""),CHAR(10),", ")

    should be

    TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(13),""),CHAR(10),", "))

    You were missing a ) at the end.

  3. very helpful! thank you so much

  4. SUggestion: rather than issuing commands to turn automatic calculation off and then on, you should retrieve the current state, then re-set to that state when done with the macro. That's more friendly than forcing either auto or manual calculation to be set.

  5. very useful, thanks !

  6. Hello,
    Can anyone help?

    When I type the code, I get a space automatically added between 'Integer: Last' (4th row down). Each time I try to remove it, vb automatically re adds a space, making my code have an error. How do I stop the space being automatically added?

    Private Sub btnRefresh_Click()
    Dim W As Worksheet:
    Set W = ActiveSheet

    Dim Last As Integer: Last = W.Range("A1000").End(xIUp).Row

    If Last = 1 Then Exit Sub
    Dim Symbols As String
    Dim I As Integer
    For I = 2 To Last
    Symbols = Symbols & W.Range("A" & I).Value & "+"
    Next I
    Debug.Print Symbols
    End Sub

  7. Much gratitude!!!

  8. Thanks man. You saved my life. I have a 28,000 lines files to import in another application and a cell with a lot of line breaks. Thanks a lot.

  9. Thanks for Help.It's great.

  10. Thanks so much. This is a great tool !

  11. Any reason why 'If 0 0 Then'?

  12. So I used the =CLEAN(cell#) to get the data into a new cell without any line breaks. How do I keep the newly formatted data while deleting the reference cell so that I can save the file as a text file and not have to deal with the data containing the unwanted line breaks?

    • Solved my own problem by copying, pasting Values into a new cell, and then deleting the old cells

  13. The find and replace method worked for once cell, but not for any of the thousands of other cells that I am trying to fix. When I try to find ctl+J or ctl+ENTER, there is nothing to find, yet the cells appear to have line breaks. All text was copied from a website. Any ideas of why the one cell worked and the others didn't?

  14. Thank you very much. I tried method 1 and it worked perfectly.

  15. thanks, it works

  16. Yeah so the first method doesnt work anymore.

  17. Thanks!
    You saved my day!

    Anna

  18. The functions it's work!! Excellent, my friend.

    Thanks.

  19. How to know Char in Word, plz find ,and give me

  20. I search on CTRL-J and it works, then doesn't work - I've replicated this over and over - seems like a ludicrous Excel bug?

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