Formula – Remove Unwanted Characters – Excel

This tutorial will demonstrate how to remove unwanted character(s) from a cell in Excel.

Remove Unwanted Characters

If you want to remove unwanted characters from a cell, use the SUBSTITUTE Function to replace the unwanted character with blank text (“”). Here we will remove all spaces from a cell:

=SUBSTITUTE(B3," ","")

This example will replace an exclamation mark (!):

=SUBSTITUTE(B3,"!","")

Nested SUBSTITUTE Functions

With the SUBSTITUTE Function, as shown in the examples above, it’s only possible to remove one text string (or character) at a time. But you can remove multiple unwanted characters at once by nesting SUBSTITUTE Functions.

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(B3,"#","-"),"--","-")

This example removes any the pound signs “#” or double dashes “–” and replaces them with a single dash “-“.

Remove Unwanted Characters in Google Sheets

These formulas work exactly the same in Google Sheets as in Excel.