Solve the problem of deleting spaces in excel cells in five minutes

This article brings you relevant knowledge about excel, which mainly introduces the related issues of deleting cell spaces and deleting spaces in cells. This question seems simple, but it is actually a bit complicated. It can be roughly divided into four types of small problems. Let’s take a look at them together. I hope it will be helpful to everyone.

Related learning recommendations: excel tutorial

Today I will talk to you about a common problem in the process of data cleaning and organization: deletion Spaces in cells. This question seems simple, but it is actually a bit complicated. It can be roughly divided into four types of small problems. Next, we will talk about them one by one from the shallower to the deeper.

1. Serious space deletion

Let’s talk about the first and simplest situation first.

As shown in the figure below, A:B is the data source, column A is the name of the person, and column B is the score. Because there are a lot of spaces before and after the name in column A, the VLOOKUP function in column E returns an error value.

In this case, just find and replace directly and replace the spaces with blanks.

It should be noted that the space here is best copied from the cell rather than entered manually. You will learn later that there are dozens or hundreds of styles of spaces, and the space key is just one of the common ones~

2. Say one of the spaces in the ID card

In special cases, delete the spaces in the ID card.

As shown in the figure below, there are spaces in the ID number in column A and need to be deleted.

The first reaction of some friends is to find and replace, but because the ID card is a long text, it will be converted into a numerical value after replacement, and the maximum length of the numerical value effectively saved in the cell is 15 digits, which results in the last three digits of the 18-digit ID card being converted to 0.

There are two commonly used solution methods, one is the SUBSTITUTE function, The result returned by the text function must be text, so it will not cause the ID number to be deformed:

=SUBSTITUTE(A2,” “,””)

The other one is search and replace, but it adds a little foreplay and uses the format brush to force the cells to be converted to text format.

3. Remove leading and trailing spaces

Sometimes we don’t need to delete all the spaces in the data, but need to delete all the leading and trailing spaces, the middle One consecutive space is reserved, and Excel provides a special function for this: TRIM.

As shown in the figure below, the data in column A contains a large number of spaces and needs to be converted to the style of column B.

Enter the following formula in cell B2:

=TRIM(A2)

4. Delete the spaces exported by the system

As we said above, There are hundreds of different types of spaces, and the space key is just one of the common ones.

You enter the formula in cell A2:

=UNICHAR(ROW(A1))

Fill it into the area A1:A10000, and you can see a variety of character graphics, including cows, sheep, airplanes, and cannons. Ships, burgers, etc., there are also various visible and invisible spaces.

You can get whatever you need for aircraft and cannons.

If you have time, you can also use these graphics to draw...

Export from the system The data sometimes contains spaces that are not generated by the formal space key.

For this kind, if it is visible, you can copy one from it and then find and replace.

If the search and replace fails, you can use the TRIM CLEAN function combination:

=CLEAN(TRIM(A1))

CLEAN, which means cleaning in English, can clean up some invisible spaces.

But whether it is search and replace or the CLEAN function, they are functions developed by Excel in recent times, which means that they cannot solve many new generation spaces.

For example, the famous zero-width blank 8203. 8203 is its UNICODE encoding. If your Excel version is 2019 and above, you can use UNICHAR (8203) to return this character.

Zero-width blank 8203 is like a ghost, completely invisible. Not only is it invisible in Excel, but it is also invisible when data is copied to WordPad, Word and other software. However, if it does exist, it will still cause VLOOKUP. Conditional queries or statistical functions cannot be calculated correctly.

As shown in the figure below, using the LEN function, you can find that the length of the string returned by the function is completely different from what you can see with the naked eye, but you cannot find any redundant words in the edit column.

对于这种情况，由于不可见字符通常出现在数据的首尾，可以使用LEFT函数查找首个字符是否返回空白。

如果LEFT函数返回结果为空白，则使用SUBSTITUTE函数将它替换即可。

=SUBSTITUTE(A2,LEFT($A$2),””)

同理，如果空格在尾部，可以使用RIGHT函数：

=SUBSTITUTE(A2,RIGHT($A$2),””)

或者管它是头是尾是左是右是男是女，二元对立多烦啊？统统一刀切了！

代码看不全可以左右拖动..

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2,RIGHT($A$2),””),LEFT($A$2),””)

相关学习推荐：excel教程

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