Trim all Cells in a Worksheet - VBA

**Rick Rothstein** · 02-28-2012, 10:19 PM

Here is a UDF (user defined function) that I developed which will clean and trim the text passed into it. The trim operation is identical to Excel's worksheet TRIM function; however, the clean is slightly different. It cleans some additional non-printing characters that Excel's CLEAN function does not handle. Those additional characters are delineated here...

Remove spaces and nonprinting characters from text - Support - Office.com

I also included an optional argument to convert non-breaking spaces (ASCII 160) to real spaces (ASCII 32). Because non-breaking spaces are such a problem when copying text from the web, I defaulted this optional argument to True (meaning non-breaking space will be converted into true spaces and then handled, along with existing spaces, by the trim operation).

Code:

Function CleanTrim(ByVal S As String, Optional ConvertNonBreakingSpace As Boolean = True) As String
  Dim X As Long, CodesToClean As Variant
  CodesToClean = Array(0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, _
                       21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 127, 129, 141, 143, 144, 157)
  If ConvertNonBreakingSpace Then S = Replace(S, Chr(160), " ")
  For X = LBound(CodesToClean) To UBound(CodesToClean)
    If InStr(S, Chr(CodesToClean(X))) Then S = Replace(S, Chr(CodesToClean(X)), "")
  Next
  CleanTrim = WorksheetFunction.Trim(S)
End Function

For those reading this thread who are new to UDFs, they are easy to install and use. To install it, simply press ALT+F11 to go into the VB editor and, once there, click Insert/Module on its menu bar, then copy/paste the above code into the code window that just opened up. That's it.... you are done. You can now use CleanTrim just like it was a built-in Excel function. For example,

=CleanTrim(A1)