Remove Excessive Spaces – Documentation

Remove Excessive Spaces tool icon Remove Excessive Spaces command finds cells where multiple spaces are used to wrap text to a new line, and replaces them with line breaks. This is necessary for proper translation in a CAT tool.

Detailed information about Remove Excessive Spaces tool

How Remove Excessive Spaces tool can help you in your work

Quite often, the translator receives an Excel document with improperly formatted text where a series of spaces is used instead of line breaks in order to wrap text to a new line (in Excel line breaks are inserted by pressing Alt+Enter – not an easy-to-memorise key combination). This causes the following issues:

  1. Incorrect segmentation inside the CAT tool (one segment may contain several sentences because they were separated by spaces and not a line break).
  2. When the translated Excel file is generated by the CAT tool, the spaces will no longer wrap text correctly because the width of translated segments will never be the same as in the original document.
  3. If you translate Excel spreadsheets directly (without using CAT software), you will almost certainly have to either manually replace series of spaces with line breaks (equivalent of what this tool does) or add additional spaces in the translated text so that it looks okay on the screen. This is because the translation never has the same width as the original.

This tool processes all cells within selection and replaces multiple spaces (over 5 contiguous spaces) with a line break character. For an example of its operation, refer to Figure 1 and Figure 2.

Figure 1: Improperly formatted spreadsheet
The formula window reveals improper formatting of the selected cell with spaces instead of line breaks. The cell, on the contrary, looks OK.

Screenshot: Extra spaces in cells

Figure 2: After running Remove Excessive Spaces tool
The formula window shows correct formatting.

Screenshot: Proper formatting after running 'Remove Spaces'

Where to find the tool

To run Remove Excessive Spaces tool, click its button on TransTools ribbon in Excel:

Remove Excessive Spaces tool button on the ribbon

Using Remove Excessive Spaces tool

  • Select a range of cells to process
  • Run the tool. Each series of excessive spaces will be replaced with one line break in every selected cell.

Notes

Be aware that the tool reformats the text, and in some cases the new text may not be fully visible on the screen due to cell formatting (e.g. when the cell's Word Wrap setting is off). It is a good practice to check the document for such problems after translation is complete.

Undo support

This command is undoable. However, due to restrictions in Microsoft Excel, as soon as you use this tool, you will be able to undo only the latest action, and everything done before that will be forgotten. Please bear this in mind when using TransTools for Microsoft Excel, and keep a backup copy of the spreadsheet that you are processing with TransTools.

Tools for document formatting and preparation before/after translation

TransTools