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How to create a URL slug from text in Excel and Google Sheets
Topic:Text manipulationExcel & Google Sheets
=LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A2)," ","-"))✓
Verified example
Computed by a real spreadsheet engine on the sample data below.
| Title |
| How to Use Excel |
| Top 10 Tips |
| Google Sheets Guide |
| Formula Basics |
=LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A2)," ","-"))→how-to-use-excel
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Step by step
- 1Start with TRIM(A2) to remove leading, trailing, and extra internal spaces.
- 2Apply SUBSTITUTE(…," ","-") to replace every space with a hyphen.
- 3Wrap with LOWER(…) to convert all characters to lowercase.
- 4Full formula: =LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A2)," ","-")).
- 5For a more thorough slug (removing special characters), chain additional SUBSTITUTE calls for each punctuation mark: commas, apostrophes, etc.
Tips
- In Google Sheets, REGEXREPLACE can handle all non-alphanumeric characters in one step: =LOWER(REGEXREPLACE(TRIM(A2),"[^a-zA-Z0-9]+","-")).
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Frequently asked
How do I remove special characters like apostrophes and commas?
Chain SUBSTITUTE calls: =LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A2),"'","")," ","-")) — add one SUBSTITUTE per character to remove.
Does this handle accented characters like é or ü?
No — accented characters pass through unchanged. You would need to replace each accented character with its ASCII equivalent using additional SUBSTITUTE calls or a macro.
More on Text manipulation
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How-toHow to remove extra spaces
Clean leading, trailing, and double spaces with TRIM — the usual fix for lookups that fail on values that look identical.
How-toHow to convert text to a number
Turn numbers stored as text into real numbers with VALUE or by multiplying by 1 — the fix for sums that ignore values.
How-toHow to extract the domain from an email address
Pull everything after the @ from an email using FIND and MID. Works the same in Excel and Google Sheets.
How-toHow to extract the first name from a full name
Get the first name from a full name with LEFT and FIND, splitting on the first space. Works in Excel and Google Sheets.
How-toHow to add leading zeros
Pad numbers to a fixed width with leading zeros using TEXT, or a custom number format. Works in Excel and Google Sheets.