Cleaning phone numbers in Excel or OO Spreadsheet

Personally I’ve been using Excel for storing phone numbers for almost twenty years now. Every now and then I don’t recognize the phone number so I need to search in my Excel sheet looking up who called me. After ten years and 500 phone numbers plus, the information stored in the Excel sheet is ‘poluted’ with hyphens and spaces. So in this article I’ll try to explain how to clean up messy telephone numbers by removing spaces and separators in Excel?

The following example uses the nesting of formulas by removing the hyphens first, followed removing the spaces.

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2,”-“,””),” “,””)

Suggestions for improving this article are welcome, please let me know and drop me a line.