In this tutorial you will learn that how to remove leading or trailing spaces from a text string in a cell in Excel. This post will guide you how to delete leading or trailing spaces of all cells in a column.

If you remove leading spaces in cells one by one by manually, it will waste a lot of time. So this post will show you two methods to quickly remove leading and trailing spaces from text in one or more cells in your worksheet.

Assuming that you need to remove all leading spaces and trailing spaces in the range of cells A1:A4, you can refer to the following two methods to achieve it.

1. Remove Leading and Trailing spaces with Excel Formula

To remove leading and trailing spaces from text string in Cells, you can use the TRIM function to remove extra spaces. So you can type the following formula in Cell B1, then press Enter key.

=TRIM(A1)

Then select Cell B1 and drag the AutoFill Handle down to other cells that you want to remove the leading or trailing spaces.

You will see that all of your leading and trailing spaces in range A1:A4 are cleaned up.

Note: if the text contains non-braking spaces, this formula will not work, because the TRIM function is not able to remove non-breaking spaces. At this time, you should remove the non-breaking spaces firstly with the SUBSTITUTE function, and then use the TRIM function to remove the rest leading and trailing spaces. So you can write down the following Excel formula:

=TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(A1,CHAR(160)," "))

You will see that all of leading and trailing spaces are removed from the text string in range A1:A4.

Or try to use the following formula:

=TRIM(CLEAN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,CHAR(160)," ")))

The CHAR(160) formula returns a non-breaking space character.

The SUBSTITUTE function will replace all non-breaking space with new space character.

The CLEAN function will remove all non-printing characters, such as line breaks.

2. Remove Leading and Trailing spaces with Excel VBA macro

If you want to quickly remove leading and trailing spaces, you can write an  Excel VBA macro code, just do it following:

1# click on “Visual Basic” command under DEVELOPER Tab.

2# then the “Visual Basic Editor” window will appear.

3# click “Insert” ->”Module” to create a new module

4# paste the below VBA code into the code window. Then clicking “Save” button.

Sub RemoveLeadingAndTrailingSpaces()
    Set W = Application.Selection
    Set W = Application.InputBox("Select one range that you want to remove leading and trailing spaces:", "RemoveLeadingAndTrailingSpaces", W.Address, Type:=8)
    For Each R In W
        R.Value = VBA.Trim(R.Value)
    Next
End Sub

5# back to the current worksheet, then run the above excel macro.

6# select the range of cells that you want to remove leading and trailing spaces, then click OK button.

3. Video: Remove Leading and Trailing spaces

This Excel video tutorial, we’ll explore two methods to remove leading and trailing spaces from your data. We’ll start with a simple formula-based approach using the TRIM function, followed by a more advanced method using VBA code.

4. Related Formulas

• count specific words in a cell or a range
  If you want to count the number of a specific word in a single cell, you need to use the SUBSTITUTE function to remove all that certain word in text string, then using LEN function to calculate the length of the substring that without that specific word.…
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5. Related Functions

• Excel Substitute function
  The Excel SUBSTITUTE function replaces a new text string for an old text string in a text string.The syntax of the SUBSTITUTE function is as below:= SUBSTITUTE  (text, old_text, new_text,[instance_num])….
• Excel CHAR function
  The Excel CHAR function returns the character specified by a number (ASCII Value).The CHAR function is a build-in function in Microsoft Excel and it is categorized as a Text Function. The syntax of the CHAR function is as below:=CHAR(number)….
• Excel TRIM function
  The Excel TRIM function removes all spaces from text string except for single spaces between words.  You can use the TRIM function to remove extra spaces between words in a string.The syntax of the TRIM function is as below:= TRIM (text)….
• Excel CLEAN function
  The Excel CLEAN function removes all non-printable characters from a text string.The CLEAN function is a build-in function in Microsoft Excel and it is categorized as a Text Function.The syntax of the CLEAN function is as below:= CLEAN  (text)...