Sometimes you have a big list containing words and number. You wonder how would you get just the words (or numbers). If you do this by hand, it would take a lot of time if your list is big (100+ items or more). The task will be come tedious if you have thousands of them. Luckily, Excel comes to the rescue. With simple steps, you can filter the Numbers from the list and get the list with just words.

So, for example, I have this list:

Excel tools

2010

Words

MS Office

1230

…

The list can go on and on.

Now, our task would be removing 2010 and 1230 out of the list.

What you need to do is to select that column A, go to Data->Filter

Now, you will see an arrow point down appears and the top of the column, click on that, click on custom filter as below:

Now, you will a new window appears like this:

Now, the trick is to select the filter condition to be is greater than (or is less than, if you prefer) and enter number 0 into the box on the right. You will see that all boxes contain any character from a to z will be hidden.

Now, you only need to delete the rows that left and click on the filter button again to get all the rows that don’t contain numbers.

So, that’s a simple trick that help you filter out the cells that contain numbers in a list that has both numbers and text. I hope the trick has been useful. Please subscribe for more Excel tips and tricks.

Just a reminder, if you need to enter a large list, you can always use our excel autocomplete tool . It will save you time and make data entry much easier.