FIX Messy Excel Text FAST! The 5 Essential Formulas for Data Cleaning (TRIM, PROPER, etc.)

Inconsistent casing, random extra spaces, and unprintable characters make data analysis a nightmare. These five simple text formulas are your cleaning toolkit.

Dirty data—information that is inconsistent, misspelled, or poorly formatted—is a leading cause of errors in spreadsheets. While VLOOKUPs and SUMIFs may fail because of an extra space you can’t see, these five text-manipulation formulas work instantly to enforce consistency.

1. TRIM: Eliminate Unwanted Spaces

This is arguably the most important cleaning function. **TRIM** removes all spaces from text except for single spaces between words.

• **Problem:** Data entered with leading, trailing, or double spaces (" New York ").
• **Solution:** =TRIM(A2)

2. CLEAN: Remove Invisible Characters

Sometimes, data copied from the web or other programs contains non-printable characters (like carriage returns or tabs) that won't show up but will break formulas. **CLEAN** removes them.

• **Problem:** Text that looks fine but breaks a formula due to hidden characters.
• **Solution:** =CLEAN(A2)

3. PROPER: Enforce Title Case

If you have names or addresses with inconsistent capitalization (e.g., "john doe" or "MAIN Street"), **PROPER** converts the text to title case, capitalizing the first letter of every word.

• **Problem:** Mixed case strings ("gEMINI aI").
• **Solution:** =PROPER(A2) (Result: "Gemini Ai")

4. UPPER & 5. LOWER: Global Case Correction

When you need data to be uniformly upper-case (e.g., product SKUs or acronyms) or lower-case (for email addresses or comparisons), these are the tools.

• **UPPER:** Converts all letters in a string to uppercase. =UPPER(A2)
• **LOWER:** Converts all letters in a string to lowercase. =LOWER(A2)

The Pro's Trick: Nesting for Ultimate Cleaning

You can combine these functions into one powerful formula to simultaneously clean up both spacing and casing:

=PROPER(TRIM(A2))

This formula first removes any rogue spaces, and then correctly capitalizes the resulting clean string. Always clean your data before running final reports!

Which one of these formulas will you use on your messiest spreadsheet first?