Remove Parentheses in Excel (Brackets)

You can use the find and replace dialog box to remove brackets from a range of cells or even from a single cell in Excel. You can specify the bracket that you want to replace and blank values to replace with.

remove-parentheses

In this tutorial, we will look at a few ways to remove brackets from values in Excel.

Steps to Remove Brackets in Excel (Find and Replace)

You can use the following steps:

  1. First, select the range of cells from where you want to remove the brackets.
    2-remove-brackets
  2. After that, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + H to open the find and replace option.
    3-find-and-replace-option
  3. Now, enter the starting parentheses “(” in the Find what input bar, left the Replace with input bar blank, and then click Replace All.
    4-enter-the-starting-parentheses
  4. This will replace starting parentheses with a blank value.
    5-replace-starting-parentheses-with-blank
  5. From here, you need to remove the ending parentheses as well. So enter the ending parentheses in the Find what input bar, left Replace with input bar blank.
    6-enter-ending-parentheses
  6. In the end, click Replace All to replace it.
    7-replace-ending-parentheses

This is a two-step method where you remove the starting bracket and the ending bracket.

Formula to Remove Brackets in Excel

You can also use the formula to remove brackets from a cell or a range of cells. And for this, you need to use the Excel SUBSTITUTE function.

formula-to-remove-brackets

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,”(“,””),”)”,””)

With SUBSTITUTE, you can refer to a cell, specify a value you want to replace, and a new value to replace. Here you have two SUBSTITUTE functions; one is wrapping another. The first removes the starting bracket:

refer-to-a-cell

And then, the second SUBSTITUTE removes the ending bracket using the value returned by the first SUBSTITUTE.

second-substitute-removes-ending-brackets

VBA Code

You can also use a VBA code to remove the parentheses from the selected cells.

Sub remove_parenthese()

'this will replace the starting parentheses.
Selection.Replace What:="(", Replacement:="", LookAt:=xlPart, _
SearchOrder:=xlByRows, MatchCase:=False, SearchFormat:=False, _
ReplaceFormat:=False

'this will replace the ending parentheses.
Selection.Replace What:=")", Replacement:="", LookAt:=xlPart, _
SearchOrder:=xlByRows, MatchCase:=False, SearchFormat:=False, _
ReplaceFormat:=False

End Sub

You need to select the cells and then just run this code.

Download Sample File