How to Use Excel's TRIM Function

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today, I'm going to show you how to use Excel's TRIM Function. Let's open up Excel, by going to our Start button. Then, go to All Programs. Let's find Microsoft Office. Let's open up Excel. Now, what the TRIM Function will do for you, is it will clear off any spaces that are within a cell, surrounding the data, on both the left hand side of the data, as well as the right hand side, so in cell A1 here, I'm going to type in a whole bunch of spaces, and then some data, and then a whole bunch of spaces again. Now, as you can see, because all these spaces are in this cell, it's kind of pushed this over a little bit. What we want to do, is create a function that will clear out all of those spaces, from both the front, and the end of the data. To do that, let's click where we want the new data to appear, and we will say =, to begin a new formula, and let's just type TRIM, which it gives you a little bit of text here, is what it does. Remove all spaces from a text string, and let's do an opening parenthesis. Now, we're going to click on A1. That tells it what cell to trim. Let's do a closed parenthesis, and to see the results, just press Enter. As you can see, it has trimmed off all of those leading spaces, from the beginning of the text. My name is Dave Andrews, and I've just showed you how to use the TRIM Function, in Excel."