You can use the following formula to remove the percentage symbol ( % )from a cell in Excel:
=SUBSTITUTE(A2, "%", "")*100
This particular formula removes the percentage symbol from the value in cell A2.
The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.
Example: Remove Percentage Symbol in Excel
Suppose we have the following list of percentages in Excel:
Suppose we would like to remove the percentage symbol from each value in column A.
We can type the following formula into cell B2 to do so:
=SUBSTITUTE(A2, "%", "")*100
We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B:
Column B now displays each of the values in column A with the percentage symbol ( % ) removed.
How This Formula Works
Recall the formula that we used to remove the percentage symbol:
=SUBSTITUTE(A2, "%", "")*100
This function first uses the SUBSTITUTE function to substitute the percentage symbol in cell A2 with nothing.
For cell A2, this produces the value 0.123.
We then multiply by 100 to get the value 12.3.
The result is that we’re able to remove the percentage symbol and still be left with the original value from the cell.
Note that the value that results from this formula is in a General number format:
This means we can still perform numerical calculations using this value if we’d like.
Additional Resources
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Excel:
Excel: How to Remove Specific Text from Cells
Excel: How to Remove Special Characters
Excel: How to Remove Last 3 Characters from String
