Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Getting Rid of Alphabetic Characters.
Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated May 20, 2023)
This tip applies to Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003
Bryan has a worksheet that has a lot of cells that have some alphabetic characters in them. He is looking for a way to get rid of only those alphabetic characters, no matter where they appear in the cell. For instance, if the cell contains "ABC123," Bryan wants to get rid of "ABC" and have just "123" remaining. Similarly, "A3B2C1" should become "321" and "#45P*%" should become "#45*%".
The only way to approach this problem is through the use of macros. If you want to simply strip out the characters, in place, then you can do so by selecting the cells you want to affect and then running a macro that examines each cell and deletes the offending characters. There are many ways you could do this; the following macro is a straightforward approach.
Sub CleanText1() Dim rngCell As Range Dim intChar As Integer Dim strCheckString As String Dim strCheckChar As String Dim intCheckChar As Integer Dim strClean As String For Each rngCell In Selection strCheckString = rngCell.Value strClean = "" For intChar = 1 To Len(strCheckString) strCheckChar = Mid(strCheckString, intChar, 1) intCheckChar = Asc(strCheckChar) Select Case intCheckChar Case 65 To 90 'upper case chars 'Do nothing Case 97 To 122 'lower case chars 'Do nothing Case 128 To 151 'special language chars 'Do nothing Case 153 To 154 'special language chars 'Do nothing Case 159 To 165 'special language chars 'Do nothing Case Else strClean = strClean & strCheckChar End Select Next intChar rngCell.Value = strClean Next rngCell End Sub
The nice thing about this approach to stripping out the characters is that you can easily get rid of other characters by simply modifying what is checked (and what actions are taken) in the Select Case structure.
If you don't want to modify the original cells, a good approach is to put together a user-defined function that will return a "clean" version of a string. This can be achieved by making a few modifications to the previous macro.
Function CleanText2(ByVal sRaw As String) As String Dim intChar As Integer Dim strCheckString As String Dim strCheckChar As String Dim intCheckChar As Integer Dim strClean As String Application.Volatile strClean = "" For intChar = 1 To Len(sRaw) strCheckChar = Mid(sRaw, intChar, 1) intCheckChar = Asc(strCheckChar) Select Case intCheckChar Case 65 To 90 'upper case chars 'Do nothing Case 97 To 122 'lower case chars 'Do nothing Case 128 To 151 'special language chars 'Do nothing Case 153 To 154 'special language chars 'Do nothing Case 159 To 165 'special language chars 'Do nothing Case Else strClean = strClean & strCheckChar End Select Next intChar CleanText2 = strClean End Function
In order to use the function, you could put a formula such as the following in a cell:
=CleanText2(A1)
The result is that the formula returns a "clean" version of whatever is in cell A1 without disturbing the contents of cell A1.
Note:
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3219) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Getting Rid of Alphabetic Characters.
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