Ah, you thought I will let you go to the next decade without a “year in review” post? No so fast my friend, not so fast.
[This post is a bit long by our standards, but full of gooey excel goodness. So get a cup of coffee or choco and get going]
January 2009
The year 2009 has been pivotal in PHD’s life. It all started with a friendly email from Microsoft on Jan 1st telling me that PHD become an MVP. I felt wonderful knowing that. Even though the award meant little in terms of benefits, it is a great tribute to our little community and the passion we share here.
Later in the first week we wrote a post on how to make combination charts in excel. The discussion on combo charts continued throughout the year, so much that when I posted a holiday greeting card at the end of the year, Santhosh, one of our regulars said that they card looked like a combo chart.
Most importantly we have crossed the milestone of 2000 RSS subscribers in the Jan 2009. To celebrate that I posted one hundred excel tips. That was fun (plus Jo hated me for sitting in front of computer that long).
February
February is fun. I started off the month with an excel twitter client. Which became a wild hit on internet (ok, not so wild, but few of the other blogs in excel community did mention it. Also, JP, the rockstar VBA blogger at codeforoutlookandexcel made an add-in out of it)
Later in the month I got too excited to discover that you can use excel data filters to make a dynamic chart. By far the cheapest and easiest way to make a dynamic chart. We continued the discussion on dynamic charts for the rest of the year and posted several ways to make them.
March
I celebrated the one year anniversary of “conditional formatting rockstar” post by writing 5 more posts on excel conditional formatting. The series started with conditional formatting basics and went on to talk about how you can solve 4 most common problems using excel CF.
We also started writing about excel array formulas and continued that discussion off and on. Array formulas area fun and easy to write (once you have the basics right).
April
This has been a dull month what with my transfer from India to Sweden and sudden lack of internet connectivity. Despite all that we wrapped our first visualization contest on budget vs actual charts and posted some really excellent charting alternatives to the familiar problem.
PHD is also featured on Lifehacker for the Excel Formulas Errors – How to handle them? post.
May
We have proposed “Tweetboards” as an alternative to traditional dashboards and generated good bit of discussion in May. Later several readers emailed me their tweetboard implementations. Slowly tweetboards are spreading in the wild 😉
We also rounded up all the Excel 2007 Productivity Tips.
June
I have stared the Project Management using Excel series in this month with Project Management Gantt Charts. The 6+1 posts soon became legendary and helped me launch the project management templates. In total these posts had more than 200 comments, 150k page views in a short time.
June also was the best month PHD’s history as the blog got featured again on Lifehacker and Delicious home pages for the Excel Mouse Tricks post. Later that month we have rounded up all the techniques you can use to convert excel files to pdfs.
July
We focused on charting more and had the 14 skills you must have for making better charts. I have also written about the all too familiar sumif with multiple criteria problem and some formula solutions for it.
Later that month my post on Using Excel Goal Seek and Finding how much you need for retirement got mentioned in Lifehacker and fetched me a ton of new visitors.
August
Thanks to Aaron, who guest posted about excel waterfall charts in August. In august, I have turned my attention towards the pivot tables and wrote Excel Pivot Tables Tutorial. I have been playing with pivots off and on for a while and this post was my first serious attempt to explore the features. Later I wrote more about them and I am planning to explore pivot tables further in 2010.
In august, we have also crossed the 5000 RSS subscriber mark and celebrated it with a huge contest. Later that month I have wrapped up all the contest entries in the Excel Formulas – 29 tips post.
September
I have started the month with a discussion on Pareto Charts and how to make them in excel. Later that month I wrote about Excel Data Tables features. Both of these posts attracted a lot of discussion and helped me learn valuable new tricks in excel.
Later that month, on September 24th, I became a dad. My life has been the most wonderful and beautiful ever since.
October
In October we wrapped up the project management series with a Project Status Dashboards using Excel. Later that month I have launched the project management templates for excel product. I met several new customers and started to believe that I can make a living out of this blog.
November
In November, we started our most ambitious visualization challenge ever with the Zoho Sales Data Visualization challenge. We now have more than 30 excellent entries and I am waiting for Jan4th when we announce the voting for winner.
Also I have posted about the sumproduct formula and reviewed excel 2010.
December
We started the month with a discussion on using drawing shapes along with charts to make better dashboards. Later in the month I have written about making a quick thermo-meter chart and posted alternatives to compare targets using charts.
Finally I have released the free 2010 calendar excel for you to download and print copies.
To wrap up,
I liked this year thoroughly. Personally it has been nothing short of an exciting ride. We became parents, Jo got promoted, we purchased small piece of land (where we are going to build our dream house) and things couldn’t be better.
Blogwise, the year is equally exciting. I am extremely thankful to all of you for being there for me and encouraging me to learn and share. I met several new people thru this medium and made new friends.
I hope the year had been a memorable experience for you as well.
I sincerely wish you a prosperous new year 2010. Thank you.
PS: Those of you who visited the site yesterday must have seen the nagging “Database error”. I am sorry, but there was a problem when I moved the blog to a different server and the DB went down for almost 24 hours. Now it is up and running smoothly. Let me know if you see something funny.
20 Responses to “Untrimmable Spaces – Excel Formula”
Hi Chandoo,
First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! Wish you and your family another fruitful year ahead.
To answer your question: Power Query is the best way to trim. 🙂
Btw, if Power Query is not available, then formula would absolutely do... but did you forget to mention also Char 32?
One more question: Is the trailing minus meant to be a negative number? Maybe only the sender knows... 🙂
Cheers,
I just see your PQ way, it is amazing, I think it is the most simple way.
No idea how it did it?
I know these spaces can be a real pain but these days I advise Excel users to learn and use Flash Fill and that will learn what to do pretty quickly.
Highlight range to be cleaned. Then, in Replace, hold down the Alt key and type 0160. Replace with nothing.
I accomplished this by writing a macro to go through all the possible unprintable characters. Looped through the range.
@Steve
Brute force works just as well, its just slower
I use a different method here. First, I will copy the data from Excel and paste it in a notepad. In Notepad, I will do a Find Blanks (Space " ") and Replace (Empty) with nothing.
Then you can copy the data from Notepad and paste it back to Excel which will be a perfect number as you desire.
But Thanks for the formula. Its probably the 2nd out of 8 tricks as Chandoo mentioned. Waiting for the rest among 8 from other users 🙂
Hi....
You don't always need notepad for that. I use the Find/Replace is Excel works just fine.
I don't understand the x's. Why weren't they removed in the formula? Or are they part of some sort of numeric formatting that I'm not familiar with? I saw how you handled the non-breaking spaces and the dashes, but am confused about what role the x's played in all this.
Thanks!
Hi Andrew ,
The xs have been used solely to demarcate the actual data text ; thus , without the x in place at the end of text , as in :
x 4,124,500.00 x
it would be impossible to know that there are unwanted trailing characters , in this case , after the last 0.
These xs are not part of the original data text , nor are they used in the formulae ; they are put in only so that readers can visualize the individual items of data as they are in practice. Think of them as imaginary delimiters.
Oh, that makes sense! Thank you for the explanation. I had a feeling it was something along those lines.
You can type this character using the Keys Alt+0160.
Very useful to replace this Character using Find and Select resource.
For many years, my jobs have included ETL tasks and I built this macro to help long, long ago. I tweak it every now and again. Many co-workers, past and present, have it wired to a button on their toolbar.
Sub Clean_and_Trim()
'CAUTION: Strips leading zeroes -- do not use on zipcodes, etc.
If Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic Then
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual
Revert = 1
ElseIf Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual Then
Revert = 0
End If
For Each Cell In Selection
For x = Len(Cell.Value) To 1 Step -1
If Asc(Mid(Cell.Value, x, 1)) = 160 Then
Cell.Replace What:=Chr(160), Replacement:=" ", LookAt:=xlPart, MatchCase:=True
End If
If Asc(Mid(Cell.Value, x, 1)) = 32 Then
Cell.Replace What:=Chr(32), Replacement:=" ", LookAt:=xlPart, MatchCase:=True
End If
Next x
If Cell.Value "" Then
Cell.Value = Application.Clean(Application.Trim(Cell.Value))
End If
Next
If Revert = 1 Then
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic
ElseIf Revert = 0 Then
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual
End If
End Sub
This is awesome! What if you have several characters you need to have removed? What would be the easiest way as I can imagine there are several ways.?
# - 35
$ - 36
- 62
/ - 47
, - 44
. - 46
" - 34
: - 58
This is typical case of a Fitbit data export to Csv file. Each number has CHAR160 as thousand separator.. how smart Fitbit, thank you 😉
By the way, i prefer to copy the character, and use find and replace.
Sometimes it happens if you copy a table from outlook and paste it in excel. When you apply formula on those cells you will get error. What i use to do is
copy one character that looks like space,
select the entire range,
go to Find and replace,
Paste the copied character in Find option
Leave the replace option unfilled..
click on replace all..
All the errors shall be converted in to proper values..
Process looks lengthier.. but it is one of the simplest method
If Clean, Trim, and Substitute, or Find and Replace does not complete the job, I usually enter a value of 1 in an empty cell. Copy the Value of 1, Highlight the range of text numbers, and Paste Special, Values, Multiply. This site is great!
You can use Dose for Excel Add-In that can quickly clean huge data with one click besides more than +100 new functions and features to add to your Excel to save time and effort.
https://www.zbrainsoft.com
Hi,
I have a problem in excel. The sheet attached herewith.
TABLE CONFIG 2/6
A B C D E F G H
1 WEIGHT1 43,599 WEIGH2 62500 WEIGHT3 77000 WEIGHT4 66,500
2 DEDUCTION1 15,000 DEDUCTION1 15,000 TEMP 0 DEDUCTION2 11,005
3 RESULT 58,599 RESULT-1 77,500 RESULT-2 77,000 RESULT-3 77,505
4 RESULT SUBSTRACT 0 0 0
5 REQUIRED VALUE 77,500 77,000 77,505
Note: 1- RESULT (58599) IS TO BE DEDUCTION EITHER FROM D4 OR F4 OR H4 WHICHEVER IS MOST
LEAST CELL AMONG RESULT-1 OR RESULT-2 OR RESULT 3.
2-HENCE, RESULT VALUE $B$3 IS TO BE PRESENTED ON CELL EITHER D4 OR F4 OR H4 WHICHER IS
MOST LEAST VALUE
3-FORMULA =IF(E8<H8,$B$9,IF(E8<J8,$B$9,IF(H8<J8,$B$9,IF(H8<E8,$B$9,IF(J8<H8,$B$9))))))
CREATED ON CELL D4,F4 & H4 DID NOT WORK.
PLS FOR YOUR HELP.
THANK YOU
@R
Why not ask the question in the Chandoo.org Forums
https://chandoo.org/forum/
You can attach a file there