It is common to open a document in Excel and find excessive spaces between words. In addition to causing some visual discomfort, this formatting can even interfere with your work. Suppose you need to compare cells with the same content. Now, imagine that one of them has an extra spacing — surely the function will fail. To avoid this kind of headache, see How to Remove White Space in Excel.
The tutorial below will help you to remove white spaces both between words and to the left or right of your text.
Total Time: 3 minutes
Open the file in Excel
Access the folder where the document is stored and double-click; if you prefer, open Excel, go to “Open” and look for the file;
Create a new column to insert clear text
Next to the column with the data that has white space, write a temporary name just to signal that it will be the column with the corrected text — here we name it “Updated”;
Insert the function “Arrange” in the new column
Click on the cell next to the one to be corrected and enter the function “=ARID”; in parentheses place the cell to be cleaned.
For example: “ = TIME(A2) ”;
then hit enter on your keyboard;
Use autocompletion for the rest of the column
In the corner of the cell that received the function, it will have a little “+” sign; drag it down to fill the other cells and thus tidy up the entire sheet.
How to delete line breaks and unprintable characters
In addition to those excess spaces, it is possible that a document may also be accompanied by line breaks and unprintable characters. In these cases, just the “Arrange” function will not organize your spreadsheet.
If you tried the above tutorial and still didn’t get the expected result, use “ =TAKE ” to remove that kind of space in Excel.
The process is very similar to what we taught above, the only difference is the function itself. So, if you want to remove the special characters from cell A2, for example, add a temporary column beside it and enter the formula “=TAKE(A2)”.
