Remove leading and trailing spaces from text

If you need to strip leading and trailing spaces from text in one or more cells, you can use the TRIM function. In the example show, the formula in cell C3 is: =TRIM(B3) 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

April 14, 2025 · 1 min · 64 words · Cheryl Paul

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Explanation

The TRIM function is fully automatic.

All you’re gonna wanna do is supply a reference to a cell.

The TRIM function then takes over to remove extra spaces and returns the final text.

Excel formula: Clean and reformat telephone numbers

By adding the SUBSTITUTE function to the formula, it’s possible for you to remove specific characters.

SUBSTITUTE Function

The Excel SUBSTITUTE function replaces text in a given string by matching.

Excel formula: Remove unwanted characters

Excel CLEAN function

Excel TRIM function

Excel SUBSTITUTE function