Cleaning up text in Excel: CLEAN, TRIM, and SUBSTITUTE

In Excel, you will occasionally deal with text fields containing line breaks, multiple spaces, hyphenation, currency and letterlike symbols, etc. This is common when dealing with unrestricted user-inputted data and can cause issues. In particular, these kinds of values will be hard to connect with related values without cleanup. When we MATCH those values with related data tables, errors are bound to occur.   Basic cleanup approaches include manual replacement of all of the unnecessary characters with a desired or

UNICODE and UNICHAR functions

The Unicode Standard is the primarily used scheme for internal processing and storage of text, with almost 150 thousand code points representing characters. The Unicode Standard is supported in Excel. However, some functions for text manipulation still support only ASCII orĀ ANSI character sets. Examples of those include the CLEAN function and the TRIM function. The CODE function and the CHAR function used for character manipulation also fall into that category. Full character manipulation is available through the UNICODE function and