How do I fix weird spaces in Excel?

Question

When you import data in Excel from an external data source, it often comes with some extra spaces. If you don’t want the unnecessary spaces, how do you remove them? In this article, I will introduce you some ways to remove extra spaces between words in cells.

Table of Contents Show

The Best Office Productivity Tools
How do I fix misaligned cells in Excel?
How do I fix text spacing in Excel?

Office Tab Enable Tabbed Editing and Browsing in Office, and Make Your Work Much Easier...

Remove extra spaces between words with TRIM in Excel

Amazing! Using Efficient Tabs in Excel Like Chrome, Firefox and Safari!Save 50% of your time, and reduce thousands of mouse clicks for you every day!

In Excel, you can remove extra spaces between words with TRIM. Please do as follows:

Step 1. Type formula =TRIM(A1) in cell B1 which is adjacent to cell A1, see screenshot:

Step 2. Press Enter key and select B1, then drag the fill handle over the range of cells that you want to apply this formula. And all extra spaces between characters have been removed from the range. See screenshot:

Tip-: 1. As they are formulas, so when you copy and paste them to other places, you need to paste them as values.

Remove extra spaces between words with VBA

With VBA, you also can remove extra spaces between words.

1. Hold ALT button and press F11 on the keyboard to open a Microsoft Visual Basic for Application window.

2. Click Insert > Module, and copy the VBA into the module.

VBA: Remove extra spaces between words:

Sub TrimExcessSpaces()
'Update 20130815
Dim Rng As Range
Dim WorkRng As Range
On Error Resume Next
xTitleId = "KutoolsforExcel"
Set WorkRng = Application.Selection
Set WorkRng = Application.InputBox("Range", xTitleId, WorkRng.Address, Type:=8)
For Each Rng In WorkRng
    Rng.Value = Application.WorksheetFunction.Trim(Rng.Value)
Next
End Sub

3. Click Run button or press F5 key to run the VBA. And a prompt box will pop out to remind you select the range that you want to remove the excess spaces, see screenshot:

4. Then click OK, the extra spaces have been removed from the cells. See screenshot:

Remove extra spaces between words with Kutools for Excel

Have Kutools for Excel installed, with Remove Spaces function, you can remove extra spaces between words quickly and easily.

Kutools for Excel includes more than 300 handy Excel tools. Free to try with no limitation in 30 days. Get it Now

Please apply Remove Spaces function by clicking Kutools > Text Tools > Remove Spaces. See screenshot:

Step 1. Select a range you want to remove extra spaces in cells.

Step 2. Click Kutools > Text Tools > Remove Spaces and a dialog will be displayed. See screenshot:

Step 3. Check All excess spaces in the Spaces Type option.

Step 4. Click Ok or Apply to remove all extra spaces in cells.

Kutools for Excel's Remove Spaces function also can only remove leading spaces, trailing spaces, leading and trailing spaces or all spaces. Click here to know more about Remove Spaces.

Relative articles:

Remove trailing spaces from cells
Remove leading spaces in cells
Remove spaces between character and numbers within cells
Remove leading and trailing spaces
Remove indents within cells

The Best Office Productivity Tools

Kutools for Excel Solves Most of Your Problems, and Increases Your Productivity by 80%

Reuse: Quickly insert complex formulas, charts and anything that you have used before; Encrypt Cells with password; Create Mailing List and send emails...
Super Formula Bar (easily edit multiple lines of text and formula); Reading Layout (easily read and edit large numbers of cells); Paste to Filtered Range...
Merge Cells/Rows/Columns without losing Data; Split Cells Content; Combine Duplicate Rows/Columns... Prevent Duplicate Cells; Compare Ranges...
Select Duplicate or Unique Rows; Select Blank Rows (all cells are empty); Super Find and Fuzzy Find in Many Workbooks; Random Select...
Exact Copy Multiple Cells without changing formula reference; Auto Create References to Multiple Sheets; Insert Bullets, Check Boxes and more...
Extract Text, Add Text, Remove by Position, Remove Space; Create and Print Paging Subtotals; Convert Between Cells Content and Comments...
Super Filter (save and apply filter schemes to other sheets); Advanced Sort by month/week/day, frequency and more; Special Filter by bold, italic...
Combine Workbooks and WorkSheets; Merge Tables based on key columns; Split Data into Multiple Sheets; Batch Convert xls, xlsx and PDF...
More than 300 powerful features. Supports Office / Excel 2007-2021 and 365. Supports all languages. Easy deploying in your enterprise or organization. Full features 30-day free trial. 60-day money back guarantee.

Read More... Free Download... Purchase...

Office Tab Brings Tabbed interface to Office, and Make Your Work Much Easier

Enable tabbed editing and reading in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, Visio and Project.
Open and create multiple documents in new tabs of the same window, rather than in new windows.
Increases your productivity by 50%, and reduces hundreds of mouse clicks for you every day!

Read More... Free Download... Purchase...

Oldest First

Sort comments by

Oldest First

Newest First

Comments (3)

No ratings yet. Be the first to rate!

Noor

about 8 years ago

This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site

Hi, I have created characters using private character editor,I have created the characters in the middle of the screen,when assigned each character to button,found a huge gap between each character,how to reduce the spaces between characters,any way to resize the characters removing the extra space in each character else I need to design all again. Please reply me Thanks Nisha