Excel includes an interesting worksheet function whose duty it is to make sure that your text is "clean." By this, Excel means that your text contains only printable characters. Thus, the function removes certain non-printable characters and control codes from your text. The syntax is rather simple, as follows:
=CLEAN(text)
All you need to do is include the text, or a reference to a cell that contains text. In doing some testing, it appears that the function removes anything with an ANSI value of 1 through 31, as well as the values 129, 141, 143, 144, and 157.
So why would you use the CLEAN function? If you import information from some mainframe or on-line services, the non-printable codes could be interspersed in the information you receive. This can cause problems printing or viewing the information correctly. CLEAN can help rectify those problems.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (10350) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Office 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Cleaning Text.
Professional Development Guidance! Four world-class developers offer start-to-finish guidance for building powerful, robust, and secure applications with Excel. The authors show how to consistently make the right design decisions and make the most of Excel's powerful features. Check out Professional Excel Development today!
Excel allows you to easily format cells with different fonts, borders, and colors. If you want to count the number of ...
Discover MoreIf you need to do some work in the base-8 numbering system (octal), you'll love two worksheet functions provided by Excel ...
Discover MoreIf you need to know the number of columns in a particular range, you can use the COLUMNS worksheet function. This tip ...
Discover MoreFREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
2019-12-16 15:33:56
Roy
SPAM-much "Tom"?
Usually, people hook these messages at least a little to the Tip in question before going on a lot about the wonders of their SPAM item.
2019-12-14 13:00:47
Tom Cruckshank
I like to use a, free for private use, set of utilities called ASAP Utilities. These utilities will do so much! In the text section, you can select to remove leading, trailing or excessive spaces.
Recently I had some data that contained a raft of HTML tags scattered throughout the data. In the Web section, there is a command to remove these. Worked like a charm. Highly recommend that Excel users get these utilities.
Got a version of Excel that uses the ribbon interface (Excel 2007 or later)? This site is for you! If you use an earlier version of Excel, visit our ExcelTips site focusing on the menu interface.
FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
Copyright © 2021 Sharon Parq Associates, Inc.
Comments