Excel Shortcuts to Clean, Trim, and other useful formulas to Cleaning up data.

Posted: September 14, 2015

Excel Shortcuts to Clean, Trim, and other useful formulas to Cleaning up data.

When working with data it is often necessary to ‘clean’ the data first so that you can work with it. Often formatting is distracting or inconsistent, there may be extra spaces between words and on occasion there may be special characters that are not visible but, get in the way of working with data. Sometimes data is not in a format that you can use. This data needs to be prepped for use. Sometimes this is called data processing; we refer to it polishing data. Two common formulas for cleaning data include:

• clean() Removes special characters from your cell values.

• trim() Removes extra spaces between words and at the ends of your cell value.

This video goes into how to use these two functions.