When you copy and paste text into a cell, do you sometimes have spaces before or after? Do they distort your results?

To avoid having distorted results because of spaces before or after a word (or text string) in a cell, or even having false duplicates in a pivot table, use the TRIM function.

=TRIM(text)

Use this function in a formula and select the cell containing the text to “clean“.

This function will remove only unnecessary spaces:

  • Before and after words (or text string)
  • Double space: two spaces instead of one between 2 words