Sometimes, you may get data (text or numbers) that have dashes (or hyphens) in it.

If you want to remove these dashes in Excel, you can use a couple of methods.

And no… doing it manually is not one of the options I cover here.

This can be particularly useful when you get social security numbers data (which is in AAA-GG-SSSS format), and you want to remove these dashes and just get the number.

Let me show you two really simple ways to do this.

The easiest way to remove dashes in Excel is to use the Find and Replace feature.

As the name suggests, you can find all the cells that have a dash (or hyphen) in it and then replace it with a space character or a null string.

Let’s see how to do this.

Suppose you have SSN data as shown below and you want to remove the dash and only get the numbers.

Below are the steps to use find and replace to remove dashes in Excel:

The above steps would remove all the dashes from the cells and you will be left with the numbers only.

This is a really quick method to remove dashes in Excel, but there are a couple of things you need to know when using it:

Another simple method to get rid of dashes in Excel is to use formulas.

Suppose you have SSN data as shown below and you want to remove the dash and only get the numbers.

The below Excel formula will do this:

The above SUBSTITUTE formula takes three arguments:

The above formula looks for the dash (or hyphen or whatever you specify) in the cell and replaces it with a null string (which essentially means is that it removes all the dashes in the cell).

Other Excel tutorials you may find useful: