Comments on: 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 2013, 2010 – 2003 Continue reading →

Comments page 6. Total comments: 159

  1. Thanks a lot !!!

  2. pedro louro method worked great! Thanks!

  3. Excellent!

  4. Your macro was excellent thanks!

  5. thank you very much, it was useful for me

  6. Excellent tips with easy to follow instructions...Thank you!

  7. This was a great help. I used the Clean function to remove unprintable characters before creating a JSON file from the Excel file. Before doing this , I was cleaning the JSON file manually.. Thank You !

  8. Great idea. I've been wondering how to do that for some time but never had a compelling reason (more than curiosity). I co-worker asked today if I could do it and had a huge need - the CNTL-H, CNTL-J, inserted a ^ worked great.

  9. Very helpful! Thank you so much!

  10. Incredibly helpful - thanks much

  11. thanks a lot
    at was successful
    I tried to get the CR by pressing ALT+13, but did not work

  12. I was having the same problem of replacing lots of CRs on a Excel Sheet
    and by 'mistake' I found a trick... is very simple and it works in Excel 2010

    CRs REPLACING:

    Select the cell range you want for replacing CRs

    In the [Find and Replace] dialog go to the [Replace] Tab
    - Click in the [Find what:] box and then type CTRL+ENTER (nothing appears)
    - In the [Replace with:] box type the replacing text... or leave empty.

    For being sure just click [find all] and after click [replace all] or whatever...

    to remove the finding text just go to [find what] and press DEL and BACKSPACE

    eh voila...
    Be happy...

  13. CLEAN does not remove leading or trailing spaces. For this use =TRIM(CLEAN(B2))

  14. i am writing from Excel to text file. how to add new line character?

    1. @Santosh

      adding a new line character shouldn't be hard if you have a constant character to key off of. In that case you can use substitute to replace key character with the key character and char(13)

  15. hi how to add new line character?

  16. These methods are great but do not seem to help with the problem I am having. Excel 2010 appends a hidden linefeed 0x0d followed by a hidden carriage return 0x0a at the end of each cell. I have a worksheet that concatenates the values in other cells to form a syntactically correct linux shell script, one shell command in each cell. Then when I output these cells to a text file so I can use them with linux, each line of my linux shell scripts has the 0x0d, 0x0a ending. The linux shell chokes on the 0x0d as I believe linux expects only a 0x0a to terminate each line of input.

    The methods here seem to remove unwanted lf and cr but not the ones excel puts at the end of every cell.

    Am I using these tools incorrectly?

    Thanks

    joe

    1. @Joe
      Microsoft products place a CRLF to perform line breaks.
      You will need to further preprocess the file, I assume a CSV on your Linux machine to remove the Carriage returns.

      I used to have to do that when transferring files
      I suggest the *nix style command line command tr

      tr -d '\r' outfile

      Make sure you name your output file a different name to protect your document in case of error.

  17. Neat! thanks.

  18. The VBA code seemed to work at first, though a space seemed better than an empty string, but now I get a Run-time error '13': Type mismatch on the If 0 < InStr(MyRange, Chr(10)) Then statement.

    1. Re:Pat and "Run-time error '13'". I had the same issue. This script worked for me several times, then stopped working with Run-time error 13. The issue was due to new data in some of the cells. In my case it was "#N/A". I deleted any cells with that data and this script worked again.

  19. Unfortunately I cannot get either the formula or the macro to work correctly on Excel for Mac 2011.

    I wish to use the formula to replace the line breaks with a comma and space. The formula supplied is missing a parenthesis off the end, but even so, with that added the formula only removes the line breaks. The extra comma and space are not being inserted.

    So I tried running the VBA but this had no effect at all.

    Is there likely to be any differences in using Excel for Mac?

    1. Ok, partly answering my own question here but:

      =SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(13),", ")

      has worked for me. So I'm handling only Mac line breaks. The combination version of the formula seemed to omit the comma and space

  20. Thank you for the macro! It really helped.

  21. Thanks a ton!!!! It's just marvelous :)

  22. Thanks A lot

  23. Thank you, it worked perfectly! Saved me a lot of trouble.

  24. Worked perfect, thanks.

  25. So helpful! (Used the formula)
    Big thanks!!!

  26. Thanks. It helps.

  27. Thanks, the clean() information was helpful.

  28. Thanks for the great VBA macro it worked perfectly!

    Any ideas on how to remove/replace strike through text?

  29. The same thing happened to me as it did to Pravin above: "I followed Solution 1, replacing 'carriage returns' with a 'comma'. I did this as I wanted to split addresses, originally in contained in a single cell, across columns using 'Text to columns', and thought the comma was a useful delimiter. The replace function appeared to work, however when I went on to use 'Text to columns' only the first piece of the text (before the comma) appeared in my original cell, no text in the columns to the right as I would usually expect. Can you help please? The data was sent to me in an Excel worksheet, but was originally extracted from an Access based database. Kindest regards, H"
    Could you please post if there is a solution. I find the only way around this is to Ctrl-x and Ctrl-v in the fx line. Very tedious when I have thousands to do.

  30. Hi Pravin
    I followed Solution 1, replacing 'carriage returns' with a 'comma'. I did this as I wanted to split addresses, originally in contained in a single cell, across columns using 'Text to columns', and thought the comma was a useful delimiter. The replace function appeared to work, however when I went on to use 'Text to columns' only the first piece of the text (before the comma) appeared in my original cell, no text in the columns to the right as I would usually expect. Can you help please? The data was sent to me in an Excel worksheet, but was originally extracted from an Access based database. Kindest regards, H

    1. Hello Howard,
      Please send a sample workbook with your data to support@ablebits.com and we'll try to help you.

      1. Thanks, Ill send you a sample across, Howard

  31. Nice.I am ver Happy!!!
    I am able to solve the issue with this
    Using
    ReplaceSubstring(CStr(nabGroupDoc.InternetAddress(0)),Chr(10),"")
    ReplaceSubstring(CStr(nabGroupDoc.InternetAddress(0)),Chr(13),"")

    Thanks a lot.

  32. Fantastic! I was breaking my head for a long time before I landed in your page! Keep up the good work!

  33. Thank you SO much! This was driving me nuts, and formula #2 worked perfectly!

  34. I'm trying to save an excel sheet to csv and I keep getting an extra line. I tried using your VBA method and couldn't get that to work (I'm assuming because I'm saving it to csv) and when I try the find and replace method it says no matches are found. Any other thoughts on why I keep getting an extra line?

    Thanks

  35. Thanks!!!

  36. I used the macro and it was really good because I don't have the question mark in a box anymore :-) but now, the macro is deleting all the formulas I had in workbook and leaving only the answers :-(.

    1. Hi Franco,

      The point is that my macro processed all the formulas on the sheet and not only those that contained a line break, my apologies. I've fixed the macro, please copy it anew from the article.

      If the result of the formula outputs a carriage return, I'm afraid nothing can be done about this. A macro cannot find where exactly in the formula the carriage return occurs, that is why it handles the formula's result and not the formula per se.

      1. Alexander,
        Thank you very much. The revised macro works great! You're awesome.

  37. Just a little mistake. You wrote: (LF, ASCII code 13) instead of (LF, ASCII code 10)

    Thank you for this useful article :-)

    1. Thank you for being so attentive and for letting me know. It's fixed :)

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