Text cleaning — Excel Course

TRIM, CLEAN, SUBSTITUTE, LEFT, RIGHT, MID and text joining. Learn it step by step with guided practice on Excelquro.

Understand

Treat text cleaning as a pipeline: remove unwanted characters, normalize spacing, extract structured pieces, then rebuild a standard label. TRIM addresses extra spaces; CLEAN removes non-printing characters; FIND/SEARCH locate separators; LEFT/MID/RIGHT extract components; SUBSTITUTE replaces known text.

Worked example

TRIM removes leading/trailing and repeated spaces while SUBSTITUTE replaces a known spelling/case variant.

=TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"MUMBAI","Mumbai"))

Follow along

  1. Inspect the raw text and identify the defect.
  2. Use TRIM for spacing problems.
  3. Use CLEAN when imported text contains non-printing characters.
  4. Use FIND or SEARCH to locate a delimiter.
  5. Extract pieces with LEFT/MID/RIGHT.
  6. Use SUBSTITUTE or joining functions to create the final standardized value.

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