Deleting All Characters Up Through a Unique Character Sequence

Gary has a worksheet that contains a lot of information pasted from other sources. Sometimes cells will contain unwanted characters, and deleting all the unwanted characters cell by cell can be tedious. Gary can tell that all the unwanted characters always end in, say, a sequence such as "x27g," though the number of characters before this sequence can vary from cell to cell. He wonders if there a way to use Find and Replace to delete not only the sequence but everything before the sequence from all the cells in a worksheet.

At first blush, this may seem like the type of task that is best suited to a macro. This is not the case, however. You can actually accomplish the task using Find and Replace with wildcards. Testing shows that this will work just fine:

1. Press Ctrl+H. Excel displays the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.

2. In the Find What box, enter an asterisk followed by your ending sequence. Thus, in Gary's case, he would enter "*x27g" (without the quote marks).
3. Make sure the Replace With box is empty.
4. Click Replace All.

If that doesn't work for you, it is possible that there are some of the Find and Replace options set incorrectly. You can display the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box again, but this time click the Options button. This results in an expanded dialog box. Make sure that no formatting is set, that the Look In drop-down list is set to Formulas, and that the Match Entire Cell Contents check box is cleared.

If, for some reason, you prefer to use a macro to do the replacements, the following will work just fine.

Sub DeleteBefore()
    Dim rCell As Range
    Dim sFind As String
    Dim iLen As Integer
    Dim iFind As Integer

    sFind = "x27g" 'Change as desired
    iLen = Len(sFind)
    For Each rCell In Selection
       iFind = InStr(rCell, sFind)
       If iFind > 0 Then
           rCell.Value = Mid(rCell, iFind + iLen)
       End If
    Next
End Sub

This is a simple macro that looks at each cell in whatever range you've selected. If the cell contains your ending sequence (specified in the sFind variable), then everything up through that sequence is deleted.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (13828) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365.