Remove Leading & Trailing Spaces in Microsoft Excel 2010

In this article we will learn how to remove leading spaces in Microsoft Excel 2010. Sometimes text values contain leading, trailing, or multiple embedded spaces. We need to remove them so that the formula referencing these cells calculate correctly.

There are two ways we can remove these spaces:

 

1) Using Trim & Substitute Function

2) Replace command

 

Trim: Removes all spaces from a text string except for single spaces between words.

Syntax =TRIM(text)

Example: Column A contains text with leading spaces in front of the text. These spaces have been removed by using the Trim Function. See below screenshot:

 

 

If the data contains leading spaces&more than one space in between the text then the Trim Function will not remove all of them. Cell A1 contains text with leading space & space in between the text. Trim will remove all the leading space except the space in between the text.See below screenshot:

 

 

Alternatively, we can use the Substitute Function in case we know our text contains spaces in between the words and need to be removed.

 

Substitute: Substitute replaces existing text with new text in a text string.

Syntax =SUBSTITUTE(text,old_text,new_text,instance_num)

See below picture. The Substitute function replaces the space in between the text with “nothing”. Hence, the space gets removed.

 

 

If the data contains a leading space & more than one space in between the text then the Substitute Function will remove all of them. Cell A1 contains text with leading spaces& spaces in between the text. The Substitute function will remove all the spaces.See the below screenshot:

 

 

Method 2:

We can also use the Replace command to remove the unwanted spaces. This command works similarly as the Substitute function. The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + H

• Replace command can be used in case we know our text contains spaces in between the text&we need to remove them.
• In Find what: write space by pressing the space bar key once.
• In Replace with: NULL

 

 

• We cannot see the entry in the Find What box because we have put a space there. Click on Replace All till you see the dialog box showing the text that it could not find any more spaces to replace.

 

 

You will get the result below:

 

 

So this is how you can remove the leading and trailing spaces and spaces in between the text and make your data more readable.