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 has the Trim formula to use for deleting extra spaces from text. Below you can find the steps showing how to use this option: Now pick the first cell in the original column and press Shift + F10 or the menu button . Then just press V.
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.
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. 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. 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: 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.Use the Trim formula to remove extra spaces
=TRIM(A2)
Using Find & Replace to remove extra spaces between words
3 clicks to neat data with Trim Spaces tool
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.
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.
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
Video: how to remove spaces in Excel
265 comments
Thanks a lot
Thank you mannn...
thank you, very helpful
Thanking you. very useful
plz find ans. this problem
you cannot use this command on protected seet to use this command you must first unprotect the seet
Hello tushar,
Please see
How to unlock cells in Excel (unprotect a sheet)
Perfect save the day!
Its amazing,,
Very helpful to everyone
how to remove blank cells from the column in excel sheet.
I try to copy number for web to paste into an excel but i still can't get rid of that space could someone help me please here is the subject.
(2 917.20 )
Helo,
Please guide me how to remove space before a Number like below
" 0.29"
" 1.459"
Save as Excel 97 - 2003 -workbook (*.xls) format. Now copy the space character from the cell to use in Find and Replace, leave Replace with as blank. Don't know if it matters in which format cells are, only this way worked for me and i have Excel 2016.
hi, I have a column of numbers downloaded from another system, which is in text format, tried all the ways mentioned above but didn't work, could some one please help me out here?
3 837,87
1 927,54
2 208,57
1 891,05
1 875,18
1 880,74
5 162,41
66 271,65
180 815,92
66 795,78
200,00
5 458,81
thanks,
Nishanth
WOW its working, thank q very much...
Thanks you for the guidance
Thanq so much sir
It worked thanks a lot for space
But can we remove the in between empty space in the coloum
Thanks AAAAAAAA LOT... Saves my time and energy.. The Second way...
how to find the spaces between the string.. I don't want to remove those spaces.. but, just want to know is there any spaces in the string or not..
+92 345 5923729
HOW TO REMOVE SPACE ?
PLEASE GUIDEME ASAP WHOLE LIST I HAVE
Commission Fees on Order #3047807249291 how to trim characters from figures by using find and replace option if have different numeric figures Commission Fees on Order #3047807249 please share some trick.