Basic Description

The Excel CLEAN function takes a supplied text string and removes all non-printable characters.

The function is designed to remove the non-printable characters, represented by numbers 0 to 31 of the 7-bit ASCII code, which are often found at the start of data that has been imported into Excel from other applications.

The syntax of the function is :

where the 'text' argument can be supplied to the function either directly, as a text string returned from another formula, or a reference to a cell containing text.

Clean Function Examples

The example below shows the Excel Clean function used on four different text strings.

All four of the above examples give the same result, which is the string,