How to remove carriage returns (line breaks) from cells in Excel

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 365, 2021, 2019, and lower versions.

3 ways to remove carriage returns (line breaks) from your text in Excel

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.

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.

Please note that initially the terms "Carriage return" and "Line feed" were used in a typewriter and meant 2 different actions, you can find more at Wiki.

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.

All these 3 ways are really quick. Feel free to pick the one that suites you best:

Tip. For your are looking for a solution to the opposite task, then read how to quickly add a line break in Excel cell.

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:

  1. Select all cells where you want to remove or replace carriage returns. Select all cells where you want to remove or replace carriage returns.
  2. Press Ctrl+H to open the Find & Replace dialog box.
  3. In the Find What field enter Ctrl+J. It will look empty, but you will see a tiny dot.
  4. 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. Eliminating line breaks using Excel Find and Replace
  5. 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.

  1. Add the helper column to the end of your data. You can name it "1 line".
  2. 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)
    Excel formula to delete carriage returns from cells
  3. Copy the formula across the other cells in the column.
  4. 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 < InStr(MyRange, Chr(10)) Then MyRange = Replace(MyRange, Chr(10), "") End If Next Application.ScreenUpdating = True Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic End Sub

If you don't know VBA really well, see How to insert and run VBA code in Excel

Remove carriage returns with Text Toolkit

If you are a lucky user of our Ultimate Suite for Excel, then you do not need to waste time on any of the above manipulations. All it takes is these 3 quick steps:

  1. Select one or more cells where you want to delete line breaks.
  2. On your Excel ribbon, go to the Ablebits Data tab > Text group, and click the Convert button. Ablebits Convert tool for Excel
  3. 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: Replace line breaks with spaces

As the result, you will have a neatly organized table with one-line addresses: Line breaks are removed from the selected cells.

If you are curious to try this and 60 more time-saving tools for Excel, you are welcome to download a trial version of our Ultimate Suite. 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



Table of contents

155 comments

  1. Any reason why 'If 0 0 Then'?

  2. So I used the =CLEAN(cell#) to get the data into a new cell without any line breaks. How do I keep the newly formatted data while deleting the reference cell so that I can save the file as a text file and not have to deal with the data containing the unwanted line breaks?

    • Solved my own problem by copying, pasting Values into a new cell, and then deleting the old cells

  3. The find and replace method worked for once cell, but not for any of the thousands of other cells that I am trying to fix. When I try to find ctl+J or ctl+ENTER, there is nothing to find, yet the cells appear to have line breaks. All text was copied from a website. Any ideas of why the one cell worked and the others didn't?

  4. Thank you very much. I tried method 1 and it worked perfectly.

  5. thanks, it works

  6. Yeah so the first method doesnt work anymore.

  7. Thanks!
    You saved my day!

    Anna

  8. The functions it's work!! Excellent, my friend.

    Thanks.

  9. How to know Char in Word, plz find ,and give me

  10. I search on CTRL-J and it works, then doesn't work - I've replicated this over and over - seems like a ludicrous Excel bug?

  11. Excellent!! Ran the formula - Amazed IT!:-)

  12. Thanks so much for this! Quick and painless solution that worked the first time, which is never the case :-)

  13. Thanks Alexander. Solution 1 worked for me.

  14. Thanks a lot !!!

  15. pedro louro method worked great! Thanks!

  16. Excellent!

  17. Your macro was excellent thanks!

  18. thank you very much, it was useful for me

  19. Excellent tips with easy to follow instructions...Thank you!

  20. This was a great help. I used the Clean function to remove unprintable characters before creating a JSON file from the Excel file. Before doing this , I was cleaning the JSON file manually.. Thank You !

  21. Great idea. I've been wondering how to do that for some time but never had a compelling reason (more than curiosity). I co-worker asked today if I could do it and had a huge need - the CNTL-H, CNTL-J, inserted a ^ worked great.

  22. Very helpful! Thank you so much!

  23. Incredibly helpful - thanks much

  24. thanks a lot
    at was successful
    I tried to get the CR by pressing ALT+13, but did not work

  25. 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...
    Be happy...

  26. CLEAN does not remove leading or trailing spaces. For this use =TRIM(CLEAN(B2))

  27. i am writing from Excel to text file. how to add new line character?

    • @Santosh

      adding a new line character shouldn't be hard if you have a constant character to key off of. In that case you can use substitute to replace key character with the key character and char(13)

  28. hi how to add new line character?

  29. 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?

    Thanks

    joe

    • @Joe
      Microsoft products place a CRLF to perform line breaks.
      You will need to further preprocess the file, I assume a CSV on your Linux machine to remove the Carriage returns.

      I used to have to do that when transferring files
      I suggest the *nix style command line command tr

      tr -d '\r' outfile

      Make sure you name your output file a different name to protect your document in case of error.

  30. Neat! thanks.

  31. The VBA code seemed to work at first, though a space seemed better than an empty string, but now I get a Run-time error '13': Type mismatch on the If 0 < InStr(MyRange, Chr(10)) Then statement.

    • Re:Pat and "Run-time error '13'". I had the same issue. This script worked for me several times, then stopped working with Run-time error 13. The issue was due to new data in some of the cells. In my case it was "#N/A". I deleted any cells with that data and this script worked again.

  32. Unfortunately I cannot get either the formula or the macro to work correctly on Excel for Mac 2011.

    I wish to use the formula to replace the line breaks with a comma and space. The formula supplied is missing a parenthesis off the end, but even so, with that added the formula only removes the line breaks. The extra comma and space are not being inserted.

    So I tried running the VBA but this had no effect at all.

    Is there likely to be any differences in using Excel for Mac?

    • Ok, partly answering my own question here but:

      =SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(13),", ")

      has worked for me. So I'm handling only Mac line breaks. The combination version of the formula seemed to omit the comma and space

  33. Thank you for the macro! It really helped.

  34. Thanks a ton!!!! It's just marvelous :)

  35. Thanks A lot

  36. Thank you, it worked perfectly! Saved me a lot of trouble.

  37. Worked perfect, thanks.

  38. So helpful! (Used the formula)
    Big thanks!!!

  39. Thanks. It helps.

  40. Thanks, the clean() information was helpful.

  41. Thanks for the great VBA macro it worked perfectly!

    Any ideas on how to remove/replace strike through text?

  42. 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.

  43. 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

      • Thanks, Ill send you a sample across, Howard

  44. Nice.I am ver Happy!!!
    I am able to solve the issue with this
    Using
    ReplaceSubstring(CStr(nabGroupDoc.InternetAddress(0)),Chr(10),"")
    ReplaceSubstring(CStr(nabGroupDoc.InternetAddress(0)),Chr(13),"")

    Thanks a lot.

  45. Fantastic! I was breaking my head for a long time before I landed in your page! Keep up the good work!

  46. Thank you SO much! This was driving me nuts, and formula #2 worked perfectly!

  47. I'm trying to save an excel sheet to csv and I keep getting an extra line. I tried using your VBA method and couldn't get that to work (I'm assuming because I'm saving it to csv) and when I try the find and replace method it says no matches are found. Any other thoughts on why I keep getting an extra line?

    Thanks

  48. Thanks!!!

  49. I used the macro and it was really good because I don't have the question mark in a box anymore :-) but now, the macro is deleting all the formulas I had in workbook and leaving only the answers :-(.

    • Hi Franco,

      The point is that my macro processed all the formulas on the sheet and not only those that contained a line break, my apologies. I've fixed the macro, please copy it anew from the article.

      If the result of the formula outputs a carriage return, I'm afraid nothing can be done about this. A macro cannot find where exactly in the formula the carriage return occurs, that is why it handles the formula's result and not the formula per se.

      • Alexander,
        Thank you very much. The revised macro works great! You're awesome.

  50. Just a little mistake. You wrote: (LF, ASCII code 13) instead of (LF, ASCII code 10)

    Thank you for this useful article :-)

    • Thank you for being so attentive and for letting me know. It's fixed :)

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