Getting Rid of Alphabetic Characters

Bryan has a worksheet that has a lot of cells that have some alphabetic characters in them. He is looking for a way to get rid of only those alphabetic characters, no matter where they appear in the cell. For instance, if the cell contains "ABC123," Bryan wants to get rid of "ABC" and have just "123" remaining. Similarly, "A3B2C1" should become "321" and "#45P*%" should become "#45*%".

The only way to approach this problem is through the use of macros. If you want to simply strip out the characters, in place, then you can do so by selecting the cells you want to affect and then running a macro that examines each cell and deletes the offending characters. There are many ways you could do this; the following macro is a straightforward approach.

Sub CleanText1()
    Dim rngCell As Range
    Dim intChar As Integer
    Dim strCheckString As String
    Dim strCheckChar As String
    Dim intCheckChar As Integer
    Dim strClean As String

    For Each rngCell In Selection
        strCheckString = rngCell.Value
        strClean = ""

        For intChar = 1 To Len(strCheckString)
            strCheckChar = Mid(strCheckString, intChar, 1)
            intCheckChar = Asc(strCheckChar)
            Select Case intCheckChar
                Case 65 To 90      'upper case chars
                    'Do nothing
                Case 97 To 122     'lower case chars
                    'Do nothing
                Case 128 To 151    'special language chars
                    'Do nothing
                Case 153 To 154    'special language chars
                    'Do nothing
                Case 159 To 165    'special language chars
                    'Do nothing
                Case Else
                    strClean = strClean & strCheckChar
            End Select
        Next intChar
        rngCell.Value = strClean
    Next rngCell
End Sub

The nice thing about this approach to stripping out the characters is that you can easily get rid of other characters by simply modifying what is checked (and what actions are taken) in the Select Case structure.

If you don't want to modify the original cells, a good approach is to put together a user-defined function that will return a "clean" version of a string. This can be achieved by making a few modifications to the previous macro.

Function CleanText2(ByVal sRaw As String) As String
    Dim intChar As Integer
    Dim strCheckString As String
    Dim strCheckChar As String
    Dim intCheckChar As Integer
    Dim strClean As String

    Application.Volatile
    strClean = ""
    For intChar = 1 To Len(sRaw)
        strCheckChar = Mid(sRaw, intChar, 1)
        intCheckChar = Asc(strCheckChar)
        Select Case intCheckChar
            Case 65 To 90      'upper case chars
                'Do nothing
            Case 97 To 122     'lower case chars
                'Do nothing
            Case 128 To 151    'special language chars
                'Do nothing
            Case 153 To 154    'special language chars
                'Do nothing
            Case 159 To 165    'special language chars
                'Do nothing
            Case Else
                strClean = strClean & strCheckChar
        End Select
    Next intChar
    CleanText2 = strClean
End Function

In order to use the function, you could put a formula such as the following in a cell:

=CleanText2(A1)

The result is that the formula returns a "clean" version of whatever is in cell A1 without disturbing the contents of cell A1.

Another approach is to define, in your macro, what characters are allowed to remain in your text. In this way you could simplify the macro quite a bit. This version is done as a user-defined function, as well:

Function CleanText3(ByVal sRaw As String) As String
    Dim J As Integer
    Dim sTemp As String
    Dim sClean As String

    Const OK = "0123456789#$%&'+-*/"

    Application.Volatile
    sClean = ""
    For J = 1 To Len(sRaw)
        sTemp = Mid(sRaw, J, 1)
        If InStr(OK, sTemp) Then sClean = sClean & sTemp
    Next J
    CleanText3 = sClean
End Function

The trick in this approach is to make sure you give thought to what characters you want to allow in the processed string. Those characters should all be included in the OK constant.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (9011) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Getting Rid of Alphabetic Characters.