Need to delete words with Latin letters in Excel? This page shows how to do it instantly with !SEMTools — no formulas, no helper columns.
What this tool does
The tool removes words in selected cells based on Latin letters (A–Z, a–z). You choose one of two modes:
- containing Latin chars (at least 1): deletes any word that has at least one Latin letter (e.g., modelX, v2alpha, hello).
- containing only Latin chars: deletes words that consist only of Latin letters (no digits, symbols or other alphabets), e.g., hello, Brand. Mixed tokens like x200 or alpha-1 are not deleted in this mode.
word delimiter: a regular space character (“ ”). Custom delimiters are not supported for this tool.
Option: ignore punctuation
There is a checkbox to ignore punctuation. When it’s on, punctuation is skipped during matching, as if words had no punctuation inside or around them. This helps catch things like quotes or commas attached to words.
Text: "hello," world! v2alpha test-123
Mode: containing only Latin chars
Ignore punctuation: ON
Deletes: “hello,”, “world!”
Keeps: “test-123”, “v2alpha” (have digits, other words are deleted, because they have only latin chars and quotes, quotes are skipped)How to run it in !SEMTools
- Select the cells or the whole column you want to clean.
- Open Delete → delete words.
- Choose:
- containing Latin chars (at least 1) or
- containing only Latin chars
- (Optional) Enable ignore punctuation if you don’t want punctuation to affect matching.
- Confirm to delete words directly in place.
Quick before/after examples
example 1 — containing Latin chars (at least 1)
Before: id45 hello 123 modelX beta-2
Rule: delete any word that has at least one Latin letterexample 2 — containing only Latin chars
Before: hello 2024 alpha-1 X99 test
Rule: delete words made only of A–Z lettersTips and edge cases
- spaces matter: the tool treats words as space-separated. If you have irregular spacing, first replace your delimiter with regular whitespace character.
- punctuation setting: with ignore punctuation on, the tool strips punctuation for matching but keeps your original punctuation in place for non-deleted words.
- case-insensitive: matching ignores case (A=a).
- numbers: pure numbers (e.g., 2024) are kept in both modes.
- find alphanumeric characters in Excel
- delete words
- remove punctuation
- remove extra spaces
- find words in cells
Want to delete words with Latin letters in seconds?
!SEMTools does it in place and helps with hundreds of other text tasks.
This post is also available in RU.