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I am quite new to Excel and am looking for the most straightforward way to solve only including alphanumeric characters in a column of strings. If there are non-alphanumerics, they should simply be deleted in the string and leave only the alphanumerics.

I'd like to avoid using nested SUBSTITUTES functions because it looks clunky, but more importantly, I can't know/predict all the special symbols that could come up. I can't do SUBSTITUTE('hello-world', "-", "") -> "helloworld" because I don't want to exactly get rid of special characters, more-so only keep alphanumeric characters. So it should more so be something like - KEEP('hello-world', [A-Z,a-z,0-9]) (but I can't find something like that.

Is there a more straightforward way to do this without Visual Basic or Macros? I'd have to learn how to do those and it seems time-consuming. If not, I'd love a VBA or Macros idea.

Thanks so much!

BigBen
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question10101
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    Looks very similar and alike a question I just answered. Meaning, SO is your friend, (re)search and you should field plenty of material to work with. – JvdV Mar 09 '22 at 19:00
  • Could you link it please? The only reason i even posted is because my research didn't point me to an answer I was looking for :) Of course you're right that I should (re)search, and I did, but this question is because I am stumped :( – question10101 Mar 09 '22 at 19:48
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    See [here](https://stackoverflow.com/a/71413980/9758194) – JvdV Mar 09 '22 at 20:41

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