albatross. 1  A metaphor for a dead weight or burden that one must carry, especially when the burden is not a literal one but a stigma of some kind that one cannot easily discard or throw off. The name comes from a story about a sailor who killed an albatross that was following his ship, an act thought to bring bad luck upon the ship.
Run the Remove Characters tool by clicking on its icon under the Ablebits Data tab in Excel. To remove characters select the range with the cells that contain values you want to delete. Expand the group Remove characters or substrings. You can select one of three radio buttons according to your task.
Removing these leading spaces â or trailing spaces that fall at the end of a cell's contents â requires an Excel function. Step 1. Click in the first cell of a blank column on your spreadsheet. Type an equal sign to signal Excel that the cell will contain a formula. Step 2. Type TRIM( â without quotation marks â and click on the location of the first cell in the column that contains data you want to clean up. Type a closing parenthesis to complete the formula. Press the Enter key. Related Reading: How to Count the Number of Non-Blank Cells in Excel.