Clean up text
Remove extra spaces
=TRIM(A2)How it works in Excel
- TRIM removes spaces at the start and end.
- It also shrinks repeated spaces between words to one.
- Extra spaces are a common reason lookups fail.
- Text from websites can have a special space that TRIM misses. Use =TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(A2,CHAR(160)," ")) for those.
The idea in general
Two values can look the same but differ by a hidden space, so this tidies them to match.
What I assumed
- The messy text is in A2.
Check the result on your own data before relying on it.