Remove (or Delete) Dollar Sign in Excel

When working with currency values in Excel, you will see that Excel likes to add in the dollar sign.

While this can be convenient in some cases, other times you may not want to include a dollar sign or perhaps you want to use some other currency symbol.

Luckily, there are several easy ways to control your currency formatting in Excel.

In this article, we are going to review four easy ways to remove or change the currency symbol in Excel.

Let’s get started!

Here are Four Ways to Easily Remove Dollar Signs in Excel

Using the Format Cells Dialog Box to Remove Dollar Signs in Excel

When the dollar sign is added at the beginning of your excel data, this is the method you want to use to remove it completely.

Let’s use the following data set as an example:

Here are the steps needed to remove the $ sign from Column B:

1. Select all of the cells with the dollar signs you want to remove
2. Right-click on the selected cells and click “Format Cells”
3. In the Format Cells dialog box, select the “Number” tab
4. Select “Currency Options” under “Category List”
5. You will see a drop-down list next to “Symbol”, click on that and select “None”
6. Click OK

This should have removed the dollar signs from your data and the data now looks like this:

Using a Formula to Remove Dollar Signs in Excel

Sometimes the above method doesn’t work if the dollar symbol was not added by formatting.

In this case, you will need to try another method.

If you aren’t sure whether your data is formatted as text or not, you can check the following:

• If data is aligned to the left, it is most likely text. Excel always aligns text to the left and numbers to the right.
• A green triangle appears in the top left corner of the cell.
• Clicking on the cell shows a small, leading apostrophe sign.
• Type the formula =istext into an empty cell. Pass the reference to your cell and press enter. If the result is true, then your cell contains text.
  

If your data is in text format, here is how you can remove the dollar signs:

1. In a new column, type = RIGHT(B2,LEN(B2)-1). You can replace B2 with the reference to the first cell from which you want the dollar sign removed.
2. Press the Return key.
3. You will get the contents of the cell in question, with the dollar sign removed. This is assuming that the dollar sign was the first character in the text. You can copy this formula to the rest of the cells in the column by double-clicking the fill handle (at the bottom-right corner of the cell).

Using Find and Replace to remove Dollar Signs

If your data has a clean and consistent pattern, using the Find and Replace feature is another easy way to remove dollar signs from your data.

Here is how it is done:

1. Select all of the cells that you want the dollar sign removed from
2. Under the Home Tab, you will find the ‘Editing’ group. Click on ‘Find and Select’ and click ‘Replace’ from the drop-down menu.
3. In the “Find what” field, add the $ followed by a space character
4. The “Replace with” field stays empty
5. Click the “Replace All” button

You should see all of your dollar signs disappear.

Using the Value Function to Remove Dollar Signs

If you just aren’t sure how the dollar signs were added to your spreadsheet, this last method is a fool-proof method to extract just the value of the cells.

To do this we will be using the VALUE() Function as follows:

1. Start a new column and type =VALUE(). Within the brackets, put a reference to the first cell from which you want the dollar sign removed
2. Press Return
3. You will find only the value of the cell in question, minus any formatting that had been applied. You can copy this formula to the rest of the cells in the column by double-clicking the fill handle.

This method retains both the original column and the new column without the dollar signs.

Furthermore, if you update the original column, the new column gets updated as well.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are several methods for removing dollar signs from your excel sheets.

You do not have to resort to manually removing them one-by-one.

Hopefully you found this tutorial helpful!

References

1. Mae, A. (2023, January 4). Remove dollar signs in Excel – [ 4 different methods to delete $]. FundsNet. Retrieved February 8, 2023, from https://fundsnetservices.com/excel/remove-dollar-signs

2. Excel-specific keyboard shortcuts – stanford university (no date). Available at: https://ehs.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/Excel_Specific_keyboard_shortcuts.pdf (Accessed: February 8, 2023).