Removing excess spaces and nonprinting characters

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Data imported into an Excel spreadsheet often contains extra spaces or strange (often unprintable) characters. There are two handy functions, TRIM and CLEAN, to cleanup such data:
Examples with spaces nad nonprinting characters in Excel 365

Excel offers two functions to help whip your data: TRIM and CLEAN.

  • TRIM removes all leading and trailing spaces and replaces internal strings of multiple spaces with a single space:
    TRIM function in Excel 365
  • CLEAN removes all nonprinting characters from a string. These "garbage" characters often appear when you import certain types of data:
    CLEAN function in Excel 365

To remove all extra spaces and nonprinting characters, use these two functions:

TRIM and CLEAN text example

= TRIM (CLEAN (<data>))

TRIM and CLEAN functions in Excel 365
TRIM and CLEAN functions 2 in Excel 365

See also this tip in French: Suppression des espaces excédentaires et des caractères non imprimables.

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