Remove spaces in data copied from Excel

**antonf** · 11-25-2009, 05:02 AM

I have to copy certain columns from an Excel sheet and paste it in a Word table.

That's a doddle, but for some reason after I've pasted the columns all the values have a number of spaces in front of them.

How do I prevent this from happening. Deleting the multiple spaces is easy, but the last one is not so easy. Please note that I am forced to use spaces as the thousands separator, so I cannot delete all the spaces!

**Richard Buttrey** · 11-25-2009, 05:13 AM

Hi,

Have you tried the =TRIM() function to remove preceding or trailing spaces?

HTH

**antonf** · 11-25-2009, 05:20 AM

Excuse my ignorance, but how do I get to use an Excel function in Word?

**contaminated** · 11-25-2009, 05:48 AM

Try next
1 Open your document\
2 Press Ctrl+H
3 Click More > Special > White Space
4 Leave "Replace with" field bland or type there smth.
5 Press Replace All button

HTH

**antonf** · 11-25-2009, 07:52 AM

Thanks HTH, it works fine but then deletes the separator between the thousands as well.

I gave up on the issue - selected the table and selected and replaced all "double spaces" with single spaces, which left me with preceding spaces as well. Juggling with the column widths assisted in "hiding" the impact of those spaces.

**Richard Buttrey** · 11-25-2009, 08:27 PM

Hi,

I had assumed that the spaces were present in the Excel sheet and copied over, hence the advice to get rid of them with the =TRIM() before copying and pasting.

Rgds