Excel Tips & Tricks – Trim function

Do pesky extra spaces ever get in your way in Excel? They do for me – especially when I export from other programs.

Let’s say you have a column of First and Last Names, but instead of displaying “Bob Jones”, they are displaying “   Bob   Jones   “.

Let’s remove those spaces with a simple function called “Trim”. In the adjacent cell, enter “=trim(A1)”. (Of course, “A1” in this example is whatever cell your data is in).

And that’s it! The function takes out all the extra spaces.

Bonus: This works with number fields, too!

If you are an Advocate Capital customer and need help preparing or manipulating data in the Excel application, feel free to contact me at BHardison@AdvocateCapital.com.

We love feedback from our customers and implement suggestions often.  What shortcut do you use the most? If you have a question or idea for an Excel tip that you would like to see, let me know and I might write about it!

Billie Hardison

Training Specialist

Photo Credit: Stokkete