How to remove accents from text in Word, Excel and Google Sheets

Sooner or later you need text without accents: a customer list that a legacy system cannot import, file names that must be plain ASCII, URLs, search keys, or names that have to match across systems. Word, Excel and Google Sheets do not have a one-click "remove accents" command, but there are reliable ways to do it. This guide shows them, and where each one falls short.

First, decide whether you should

Removing accents loses information. In Spanish, "año" (year) and "ano" (anus) are different words. In Vietnamese, one syllable can mean a dozen things depending on its tone mark. Remove accents for matching, sorting, file names and URLs, but keep the original text somewhere. Do not replace the only copy of a name with a stripped version.

The fast way: paste into a tool

The quickest method for any amount of text, in any program, is to copy it, paste it into the text toolkit, choose "Remove accents" and paste the result back. It runs in your browser, so the text is not uploaded, and it handles letters that simple methods miss, such as ß, đ, ø and ł, in any Latin-script language. The rest of this guide is for when you need the step to live inside the document itself.

Word

Word has no command that removes accents from a whole document. What you can do:

1. Press Ctrl+H (Cmd+Shift+H on Mac) to open Find and Replace.
2. Type an accented letter in "Find what" and the plain letter in "Replace with", for example é and e.
3. Choose "Replace All".
4. Repeat for each accented letter that appears in your text. Do the capitals as well, and check that "Match case" is on so that É is not turned into a lowercase e.

This is fine for a handful of letters and tedious for more. For long documents, or languages with many accents, copy the text into the tool above and paste it back.

Excel

Excel has no built-in function either. If you use Microsoft 365, this formula replaces each accented letter in A2 with its plain version:

=LET(
  fromChars, "áàâäãåçéèêëíìîïñóòôöõúùûüýÿ",
  toChars, "aaaaaaceeeeiiiinooooouuuuyy",
  fromAll, fromChars & UPPER(fromChars),
  toAll, toChars & UPPER(toChars),
  REDUCE(A2, SEQUENCE(LEN(fromAll)),
    LAMBDA(txt, i, SUBSTITUTE(txt, MID(fromAll, i, 1), MID(toAll, i, 1))))
)

The two strings must stay the same length, and each letter in the first lines up with its replacement in the second. Add or remove letters in pairs to suit your language. SUBSTITUTE is case-sensitive, which is why the capitals are added separately. In older versions of Excel without LET and LAMBDA, the alternative is a chain of nested SUBSTITUTE calls, one per letter, which becomes unreadable quickly.

This approach replaces one character with one character, so it cannot turn ß into ss or æ into ae. For those, and for Vietnamese with its many combinations, use the tool.

Google Sheets

Google Sheets has no accent-removing function, but you have two good options.

Option 1, a formula with REGEXREPLACE. For a few letters, chain replacements:

=REGEXREPLACE(REGEXREPLACE(REGEXREPLACE(A2, "[áàâäãå]", "a"), "[éèêë]", "e"), "[íìîï]", "i")

Extend the chain with o, u, c, n and the capitals as needed. Each REGEXREPLACE replaces every character in the brackets with the letter after the comma.

Option 2, a custom function. Open Extensions, then Apps Script, and paste this:

function REMOVE_ACCENTS(text) {
  return String(text)
    .normalize("NFD")
    .replace(/[̀-ͯ]/g, "")
    .replace(/đ/g, "d")
    .replace(/Đ/g, "D");
}

Save, return to the sheet and use =REMOVE_ACCENTS(A2). The first step splits every accented letter into a plain letter plus a separate accent mark, the second deletes the marks, and the last two lines handle the Vietnamese đ, which is a letter of its own and does not split. Add more lines for ß, ø or ł if you need them.

Why this works: how accents are stored

On a computer, "é" can be stored as one character or as two: a plain "e" followed by a combining acute accent. Converting text to the decomposed form (called NFD) separates the accent from the letter, so deleting the accents is just deleting the combining marks. A few letters, such as đ, ø, ł and ß, are not made of a letter plus a mark, so they need their own replacement rules. That is exactly why a plain "strip the marks" approach leaves some words only half-cleaned.

Quick checklist

• Keep a copy of the original text.
• Check capitals as well as lowercase.
• Test with the hardest names in your data, not only the easy ones.
• Decide what ß, æ, ø, đ and ł should become, and apply the rule consistently.
• Remember that other scripts, such as Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and Hindi, work differently, and accent removal does not apply to them.