In this tip you'll find 3 ways to remove carriage returns from Excel cells. You'll also learn how to replace line breaks with other symbols. All solutions work for Excel 2016, 2013 - 2003 There can be different reasons for line breaks occurring in your text. Usually, carriage returns appear when you copy text from a webpage, get a workbook that already contains line breaks from a customer, or you add them yourself using Alt+Enter.
![Alt Substitute For Excel On Mac Alt Substitute For Excel On Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125400056/320869646.png)
In any case, what you want to do now is delete carriage returns since they don't let you find a phrase and make column contents look disorganized when you turn on the wrap text option. All these 3 ways are really quick.
If you're switching from Windows to Mac, you need to learn the keyboard shortcuts for important actions like taking a. You close a file window with Alt-F4 and the equivalent on a Mac is Command.
Feel free to pick the one that suites you best:. to quickly delete line breaks in 1 worksheet. to employ several formulas for a complex cell text processing.
Note: Initially the terms ' Carriage return' and ' Line feed' were used in a typewriter and meant 2 different actions, you can. Computers and text processing software were created taking into consideration the typewriter specificities.
That's why two different non-printable symbols are used now to indicate line break: ' Carriage return' (CR, ASCII code 13) and ' Line Feed' (LF, ASCII code 10). Windows uses 2 symbols one by one: CR+LF, and LF for.NIX systems. Be careful: in Excel you can find both variants.
If you import data from a.txt or.csv file, you are more likely to find Carriage Return + Line Feed. When you break a line using Alt+Enter, Excel inserts Line Feed only. In case you get.csv files from a person who uses Linux, Unix, etc., you'll find only Line Feeds again. Remove Carriage Returns manually Pros: the fastest way. Cons: no any additional features:(. Please find the steps for eliminating line breaks using Find and Replace:.
Select all cells where you want to remove or replace carriage returns. Press Ctrl+H to open the Find & Replace dialog box. In the Find What field enter Ctrl+J. It will look empty, but you will see a tiny dot. In the Replace With field, enter any value to replace carriage returns.
Usually, it is space to avoid 2 words join accidentally. If all you need is deleting the line breaks, leave the 'Replace With' field empty. Press the Replace All button and enjoy the result! Delete line breaks using Excel formulas Pros: you can use a formula chain / nested formulas for complex cell text processing.
For example, it is possible to remove carriage returns and then eliminate excess leading and trailing spaces and those between words. Or you may need to delete carriage returns to use your text as an argument of another function without changing the original cells. For example, if you want to be able to use the result as an argument of the function =lookup. Cons: you'll need to create a helper column and follow many extra steps. Add the helper column to the end of your data.
You can name it '1 line'. In the first cell of the helper column ( C2), enter the formula to remove / replace line breaks. Here you can see several helpful formulas for different occasions:. Handle both Windows and UNIX carriage return/ line feeds combinations. =SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(13),'),CHAR(10),').
The next formula will help you replace line break with any other symbol (comma+space). In this case lines will not join and extra spaces will not appear. =TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(13),'),CHAR(10),', '). If you want to remove all nonprintable characters from text, including line breaks: =CLEAN(B2).
Optionally, you can replace the original column with the one where the line breaks were removed:. Select all cells in column C and press Ctrl + C to copy the data to clipboard. Now pick the cell B2 and press the Shift + F10 shortcut. Then just press V. Remove the helper column. VBA macro to get rid of line breaks Pros: Being created once, can be reused in any workbook.
Cons: you need to have the basic knowledge of VBA. The VBA macro from the example below deletes carriage returns from all cells in the currently opened worksheet (active worksheet). Sub RemoveCarriageReturns Dim MyRange As Range Application.ScreenUpdating = False Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual For Each MyRange In ActiveSheet.UsedRange If 0 Text group, and click the Convert button. On the Convert Text pane, select the Convert line break to radio button, type the 'replacement' character in the box, and click Convert. In our example, we are replacing each line break with a space, so you put the mouse cursor in the box and press the Enter key: As the result, you will have a neatly organized table with one-line addresses: If you are curious to try this and 60 more time-saving tools for Excel, you are welcome to download a. You will be amazed to discover a-few-clicks solutions for the most challenging and tedious tasks in Excel!
Video: How to remove line breaks in Excel You may also be interested in:. Hi Pravin I followed Solution 1, replacing 'carriage returns' with a 'comma'. I did this as I wanted to split addresses, originally in contained in a single cell, across columns using 'Text to columns', and thought the comma was a useful delimiter.
The replace function appeared to work, however when I went on to use 'Text to columns' only the first piece of the text (before the comma) appeared in my original cell, no text in the columns to the right as I would usually expect. Can you help please? The data was sent to me in an Excel worksheet, but was originally extracted from an Access based database. Kindest regards, H. The same thing happened to me as it did to Pravin above: 'I followed Solution 1, replacing 'carriage returns' with a 'comma'. I did this as I wanted to split addresses, originally in contained in a single cell, across columns using 'Text to columns', and thought the comma was a useful delimiter. The replace function appeared to work, however when I went on to use 'Text to columns' only the first piece of the text (before the comma) appeared in my original cell, no text in the columns to the right as I would usually expect.
Can you help please? The data was sent to me in an Excel worksheet, but was originally extracted from an Access based database. Kindest regards, H' Could you please post if there is a solution.
I find the only way around this is to Ctrl-x and Ctrl-v in the fx line. Very tedious when I have thousands to do. These methods are great but do not seem to help with the problem I am having. Excel 2010 appends a hidden linefeed 0x0d followed by a hidden carriage return 0x0a at the end of each cell. I have a worksheet that concatenates the values in other cells to form a syntactically correct linux shell script, one shell command in each cell. Then when I output these cells to a text file so I can use them with linux, each line of my linux shell scripts has the 0x0d, 0x0a ending. The linux shell chokes on the 0x0d as I believe linux expects only a 0x0a to terminate each line of input.
The methods here seem to remove unwanted lf and cr but not the ones excel puts at the end of every cell. Am I using these tools incorrectly? I was having the same problem of replacing lots of CRs on a Excel Sheet and by 'mistake' I found a trick. Is very simple and it works in Excel 2010 CRs REPLACING: Select the cell range you want for replacing CRs In the Find and Replace dialog go to the Replace Tab - Click in the Find what: box and then type CTRL+ENTER (nothing appears) - In the Replace with: box type the replacing text. Or leave empty. For being sure just click find all and after click replace all or whatever. To remove the finding text just go to find what and press DEL and BACKSPACE eh voila.
Hello, Can anyone help? When I type the code, I get a space automatically added between 'Integer: Last' (4th row down). Each time I try to remove it, vb automatically re adds a space, making my code have an error. How do I stop the space being automatically added? Private Sub btnRefreshClick Dim W As Worksheet: Set W = ActiveSheet Dim Last As Integer: Last = W.Range('A1000').End(xIUp).Row If Last = 1 Then Exit Sub Dim Symbols As String Dim I As Integer For I = 2 To Last Symbols = Symbols & W.Range('A' & I).Value & '+' Next I Debug.Print Symbols End Sub.
Regarding this statement. On the keyboard, press Ctrl + J to enter the line break character - NOTE: Nothing will appear in the Find What box Your 'NOTE' is not entirely true. If you look carefully at the bottom left corner of the 'Find what' field, you should see a small blinking 'dot'. It is not a dot, rather, it is the top of the blinking text cursor on the line below (which Ctrl+J created) peeking through. If you press the left arrow, you will see the full text cursor because you have moved it to the other side of the Line Feed character placed by Ctrl+J.
Press the right arrow and the text cursor nearly disappears again as it move back to the other side of the Line Feed character again. Forgive me, Leonardo, but in order to avoid misinterpretation of your comment, I will take it upon myself to correctly translate a very common mistake by native Spanish speakers.
People who speak Spanish very often think that 'any' means 'no' or 'none'. The comment should read: You solved me a huge curiosity and NO page on the subject helped me more than u! By the way, I also want to thank you, Debra, for solving a long desired solution to this Alt+Enter dilemma, and Ctrl+J is good news to me too. Does not work in my version of Excel 2010. I download a csv file from an Oracle table and convert it to Excel 2010.
It contains a text field for which some have just the text and some the text and a carriage return or linefeed. I can clear those out using various, time consuming, methods such as copy and paste or =Clear, but was hoping for a Find/Replace. I tried this as soon as I saw it. Sometimes I get the flashing dot when I type Ctrl+J, most times I don't, and in neither case, does it find anything. Alt 0010 does not work either. Any ideas why it works for others but not for me?
Am I possibly getting something besides a linefeed? Sure looks like one in the cell. Thanks, Biff.
Hi Debra, Ctrl + J - what a great tip, thanks! Can't believe I never knew (or forgot) this. Looking over some of the other comments, I noticed a few people were having trouble getting this to work. It was 'on and off' for me too, until I realized that I was occasionally inserting more than one Ctrl J into the the Find box.
Because it's invisible, it's easy to do. The Find/Replace dialog retains it's characters during a session, so when you re-open it, the Ctrl J box looks empty, but it's not. Once I realized this, it worked every time for me. Hopefully, this may be helpful to others having problems.
Regards Dave. I forgot to mention that once you insert the Ctrl+J character and the type the., you will not see the asterisk either because it is below the viewing area of the Find field. You will only see the 'blinking dot'. If you play with the arrow keys you will be able to follow the dot and know how many characters, if ever, you have typed after the Ctrl+J. That would be in case you want to replace or erase a specific string. Play with it. Type several characters after the Ctrl+J and then move the cursor back and forth with the arrow keys.
Hi DJS, Have you tried inserting Ctrl+J and an asterisk in the find field? When you insert a Ctrl+J in the Find field, you will notice a tiny blinking dot at the beginning of the field. That is the cursor that has gone to the 'next line' as it does in Excel when we insert an Alt+Enter. If you press the Left arrow you will see the cursor fully reappear in the field and the Right arrow will make it go back down. Anyway, back to our scheduled program, simply insert a Ctrl+J followed by an. I type capital J for clarity, but you actually type a lower-case j. I hope this helps.
Hi, I tried, Capital J to replace the line break and the formula and all tips and tricks from this conversation. Unfortunately, nothing turned out. I am trying to replace a line break with a space in a column of my.CSV sheet. I copied the column and paste into another blank sheet and saved it and tried again with all possible options. But couldn't get the replacement. I can see that copy paste is the only option now to get my work done.
But I don't want to take a chance of losing the original data in replacing the cells when I filter them out during copy paste. Any help is greatly appreciated. Hello everyone, I tried to find with key word: 'replace break line in excel', and I see this site showing up in the first. It helps me enter the enter character on the search bar (CTRL + J or ALT + 010), But it does not help me as I would like. Actually, my line breaks are CRLF - not only LF, So just enter the enter is not enough. I also could not find a way to enter CR characters (0x000D - 013), so I added a question mark (?) before the enter character instead. For example: Apple = Apple r nSamsung Samsung.
If you want to replace into: Apple-Samsung you can search with keywords: Apple? N ( n is the enter character = CTRL + J or ALT + 010) - Hope to help someone like me.