Tip: Easily remove certain or several characters at once

Save 5 minutes a day by using ASAP Utilities to quickly remove or replace characters in your selection.

"How to quickly get rid of multiple characters at once..."

With this utility you can remove or replace certain characters in your worksheet or selected cells.
You can pick one or more characters from a list, including numbers, letters, special characters, symbols, tabs, new line characters (enters) and invisible spaces and characters. And you can use the buttons at the bottom to quickly toggle certain groups of characters.

A few practical examples of this utility:

  • remove all line breaks such as carriage returns and linefeeds (alt+enter) from your data
  • remove invisible characters
  • extract numbers from text
  • extract text from numbers
  • remove everything except for certain characters
  • replace line-breaks with a space

Just select the cells and then start:
ASAP Utilities » Text » Advanced character remove or replace...

Advanced character remove or replace

Do you recognize any of these situations?

  • I have thousands rows of data strings like following:
    PE512391
    AAC313490
    7132134BBII
    AADP8315LAN
    AC7136LKN
    I'm wondering if there's any function can help me trim those strings to only numbers? (getting rid of all letters, both in front, back and middle)
    » With this tool from ASAP Utilities just press the "All" button, and then the "1, 2, 3.." button (to deselect the numbers) and click OK.
  • I have sentences which contains special characters (!@#$%^&*()-_=+{}[]|~`?/,:;") in a single column. I need to remove all special characters other than space. Could anyone help me on this?

Just select the cells and then use the following tool:
ASAP Utilities » Text » Advanced character remove or replace...

This often a quicker alternative then using Excel's find and replace many times in sequence. Or using special functions.

Bonus tips, also interesting

How much time will it save?

It's guaranteed that you'll save yourself time and effort by using this tool. However, the actual time saved depends on how much you use Excel, the amount of data you are working with and how often you use this particular tool.
You can easily see how much time ASAP Utilities has saved you so far.

Download

In case you don't have ASAP Utilities yet, you can download the free Home&Student edition (for home projects, schoolwork and use by charitable organizations) or the fully functional 90-day Business trial.
Download page

One comment

Ankit Mac

This is just awesome. Many times I have faced some situations when some of my data contains non printing characters and hence I cannot use any lookup formulas. Your tool is just great as it can remove all those annoying characters with a button click.
Thanks for developing such beautiful utilities. :)