How to remove parentheses in Excel

You can watch a video tutorial here.

Parentheses or brackets have multiple uses in Excel. As part of sentences or paragraphs, they are used for punctuation. In formulas, they are used to group values together. You will frequently encounter parentheses when cleaning data imported from external sources and will have to remove them. 

In Excel, there are 2 ways in which these can be removed. The first way requires the use of the Find & Replace tool and the second way uses the SUBSTITUTE() function.

1. SUBSTITUTE(): this replaces one piece of text with another piece of text in a text string
   1. Syntax: SUBSTITUTE(text string, old text, new text, instance num)
      1. text string: the text in which the replacement is to be done
      2. old text: the text to be replaced
      3. new text: the replacement text
      4. instance num: (optional) the number of occurrences of the old text to be replaced

Option 1 – Use Find & Replace

Step 1 – Open the Find & Replace box

• Go to Home > Editing
• Expand the Find & Select dropdown
• Select Replace

OR

• Press Ctrl+H

Step 2 – Enter the details

• Under Find what: type ‘(‘
• Leave Replace with: blank
• Click Replace All

Step 3 – Acknowledge the change

• Click OK in the confirmation box

Step 4 – Remove the right parenthesis

• Under Find what: type ‘)‘
• Leave Replace with: blank
• Click Replace All

Step 5 – Acknowledge the change

• Click OK in the confirmation box
• Click Close to close the Find & Replace box

Step 6 – Check the result

• The parentheses are removed from the text

Option 2 – Use the SUBSTITUTE() function

Step 1 – Create the formula to remove the left parenthesis

• Select the destination cell
• Type the formula using cell references:

=SUBSTITUTE(Name,”(“,””)

• The double quotes (“”) are used to remove the left parenthesis
• Press Enter

Step 2 – Amend the formula to remove the right parenthesis

• Select the cell and press F2 to edit the cell or click the formula in the formula bar
• Amend the formula by adding another SUBSTITUTE() function:

= SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(Name,”(“,””),”)”,””)

• In the second function, the existing formula serves as the ‘text string’ argument
• Press Enter

Step 3 – Copy the formula to the other cells

• Using the fill handle from the first cell, drag the formula to the remaining cells

OR

1. Select the cell with the formula and press Ctrl+C or choose Copy from the context menu (right-click)
2. Select the rest of the cells in the column and press Ctrl+V or choose Paste from the context menu (right-click)

Step 4 – Check the result

• The parentheses are removed from the text