How to remove non-printable characters from cells in Excel?
If you work with files that come from a non-Excel source, or you paste information from another application into worksheet cells, you can sometimes end up with some non-printable or non-printing characters in your worksheet. In order to make your worksheet clean and beautiful, you need to remove the non-printable characters. But how can you remove those non-printable characters quickly?
Remove non-printable characters from cells with CLEAN function
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Remove non-printable characters from cells with CLEAN function

The CLEAN function can remove all of the non-printable characters from the cells. For example, I have Column C (C2:C11) need to remove the non-printable characters. You can do as the following tutorial:
1. Select a blank cell D2 adjacent to C2, and input:”=CLEAN(C2)”.
2. Tap the Enter key.
3. And then drag the fill handle over the range of cells that you want to remove non-printing characters. And all of the non-printable characters have been removed. See screenshot:
Remove non-printable characters from cells with Kutools for Excel
With Kutools for Excel’s Delete Characters, you can quickly and easily removing non-printable characters from cells.
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Step 1. Select the range you want work with.
Step 2. Click Kutools > Text Tools in Editing group > Delete Characters. See screenshot:
Step 3. Check Non-printing in the pop-up dialog, see screenshot:
Step 4. Click Ok or Apply to delete non-printing characters in the range.
This utility also can delete numeric characters, non-numeric characters, non-printing characters and so on.For more detailed information about Delete Characters, please visit Delete Characters feature description.
Relative articles:
- Remove alpha characters from cells
- Remove non numeric characters from cells
- Remove numeric characters from cells
- Remove non-alpha characters from cells
- Quickly remove line breaks
- Remove non-alphanumeric characters
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