Carol's Corner Office

Sometimes when you copy and paste data in MS Excel you copy over non-printing character and other strange looking things that you did not intend to copy.

Well the good news is that there is an easy way to clean up that data with a very easy to use MS Excel function called the Clean Function.

Follow the steps below to learn how:

1. Select the cells with the data that needs to be cleaned.
2. Enter the following formula: =CLEAN(A2) or whatever cell you are referencing.
3. Click CTRL + Enter.
4. MS Excel will now display the contents of the cells without the non-printable characters.

You can now copy the results to another part of your workbook using the Paste Special option to copy the values without the formulas.

Tags: characters, Clean, CTR, data, enter, formula, function, MS Excel, non-printing

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Excel 2003, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Excel, Office Productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.