How to trim starting spaces of entire column in LibreOffice or Google sheets?

Question

I'm a bit of a newbie at this, so hope to get some help.

I have a large spreadsheet where columns C and D each have a blank space before the data in each column. Can some one please explain me how to trim an entire column to remove starting spaces in LibreOffice of Google Spreadsheets

Solution 1

In LibreOffice:
1. Select the cells you want to change
2. Edit -> Find & Replace
3. Find: ^\s+
4. Replace:
5. Other Options - Regular expressions: ON
6. Other Options - Current selection only: ON
7. Click Replace All

Solution 2

I'm sure the other answer works, but if you just need to do it once, I have an easy option. Download Sublime Text or some other text editor. Look for spaces at the beginning of a string (using ("^ ") without quotes should do it), and erase them.

Text editors are really helpful for normalizing data like this when you don't need updates in the future.

Solution 3

In LibreOffice you can trim all spaces (beginning and end) via the "text to column" function:

Data -> "Text to Column"

Then assure the column is not being split (e.g. select tab als separator, if no tabs are present) and select "Trim spaces"