Sometimes you need to remove specific words from text in Excel cells. You already have a list of words, and the task is to delete all their occurrences from a list of phrases if they appear there. This often comes up after you’ve managed to find words in Excel and/or extract a list of words from text and realized they’re unnecessary.
- Example: You’re a content manager for an online store. Your catalog is an Excel file where each product entry contains both the product name and manufacturer. You have a list of manufacturers and need to remove them, leaving only product names.
- Or you have a car catalog in a single string — brand and model — and a list of about 30 brands. You want to separate the two and remove the brands from the product names.
You could use Find and Replace to replace each word with nothing, but in large files this is slow, as each replacement takes time.
For such cases, the Remove List of Words from Cells tool in the DELETE menu under Remove Words solves the problem quickly.
This tool works with whole words only, skipping partial matches. That means no accidental deletion of word parts or data corruption. However, if your list contains phrases (more than one word), you’ll need the Remove List of Phrases tool instead.
How to remove a list of words with !SEMTools
It’s simple: select your list of phrases, run the macro from the menu, select your list of words, and click “OK.” Done!
Important: Words are removed from the original range permanently. If you’re not sure about the result, copy the column first and run the operation on the copy — as shown in the video below.
If you’re dealing with this, chances are you have similar text-cleaning challenges.
The !SEMTools Excel add-in offers hundreds of tools to simplify your workflow and save hours of manual work.
This post is also available in RU.