Remove Leading and Trailing Spaces

This tool removes all spaces from the beginning and end of the values in your selected cells, while spaces between words or characters are left unchanged.

For example, a cell containing "Excel" will be changed to "Excel".
Or "1000 AP Amsterdam" stays "1000 AP Amsterdam", keeping the two spaces between the ZIP code and city name.

Compared to Excel's TRIM() function, this tool preserves double or multiple spaces between words or characters, which is helpful when spacing has meaning, such as in addresses, codes, or formatted text. It also removes leading and trailing nonbreaking spaces (character 160,  ), which sometimes appear in data copied from websites or exported from other systems and are not removed by TRIM().

As an added bonus, this tool also helps fix cells that contain a zero-length string. Microsoft uses this term for values that look blank but actually contain invisible content, such as a single apostrophe or the result of a formula like "" that was pasted into the cell as a value. After cleanup, Excel will recognize these cells as truly empty.

Cells that contain only spaces (including nonbreaking spaces) will be turned into empty cells.
Cells with formulas are left unchanged.

This is especially useful when cleaning up imported data, fixing lookup mismatches (VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP), or preparing consistent text values for sorting and filtering.

By default, you can launch this tool using the Control+Alt+Shift+T shortcut.

Starting this tool

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Tip:Alt+P for the previous tool.