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Data Cleaning with Excel

Through this guide you will learn tricks and tips to better clean and organize tabular data using Microsoft Excel.

Simple Trims in Excel

Screen Clipping showing a column with the Excel TRIM formula, which will trim the extra white space from the characters that have been entered in the column to the left.

 

Trim Instructions:

  • Create a new column next to the one where whitespace needs to be trimmed
  • Either for the whole range, or cell-by-cell, enter =TRIM() with the cells you'd like to trim inside the parentheses

Screen Clipping showing the results of the Excel TRIM function for the cell selected in the previous screen clipping. An extra space was removed between the words pain and hip.

Trim will not fix space-related spelling errors. It will only look for instances of two spaces next to each other, or leading or trailing whitespace on strings of characters.