Remove Leading, Trailing, and Extra Spaces Between Words

This tool removes unnecessary spaces from your selected cells by trimming the beginning and end of each value and reducing multiple spaces between words to a single space.

For example:

• "Lennox Street 141 " becomes "Lennox Street 141"
• " John A. Smith " becomes "John A. Smith"
• " email@example.com " becomes "email@example.com"
• " Multiple spaces in between " becomes "Multiple spaces in between"

It works like Excel's TRIM() function but with enhancements.
Unlike TRIM(), this tool also removes leading and trailing nonbreaking spaces (character 160), which sometimes appear in data copied from websites or exported from other systems. These spaces are visually identical to regular spaces but are not removed by Excel's TRIM. In web content, they often show up as the HTML entity.

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 or pasted data, fixing lookup errors (e.g., VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP), or preparing clean, consistent text for reports, sorting, and filtering.

Starting this tool

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Tip:Alt+P for the previous tool.