Remove special characters in Excel

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Strip special characters from a cell with a single REGEXREPLACE formula in current Excel and Google Sheets, or use Power Query in older Excel. Or paste text into the tool below to clean a value without a formula.

The formula

Strip special characters in Excel

Excel for Microsoft 365 and Google Sheets both have REGEXREPLACE:

Excel 365 (2024 or later) and Google Sheets:
=REGEXREPLACE(A1, "[^A-Za-z0-9 ]", "")

Older Excel, via Power Query (Add Column > Custom Column):
Text.Select([Column1], {"A".."Z", "a".."z", "0".."9", " "})

No REGEXREPLACE and no Power Query? Paste the cell into the tool above and copy the cleaned value.

FAQ

Questions, answered plainly

How do I remove special characters in Excel?

In Microsoft 365 use =REGEXREPLACE(A1, "[^A-Za-z0-9 ]", ""), which keeps letters, digits and spaces. In older Excel, use Power Query and Text.Select to keep the same characters.

Does the same formula work in Google Sheets?

Yes. Google Sheets has had REGEXREPLACE for years, so =REGEXREPLACE(A1, "[^A-Za-z0-9 ]", "") works there exactly as in Excel for Microsoft 365.

Same job in another tool: Python, JavaScript, Excel, Word or SQL.