Unfortantly I spoke too soon. The strings I'm using have some "-" that don't have spaces on either side and some that do. I only want to delete the ones that do not have spaces on either side. With this formula, if the first "-" intance does have spaces all of the "-" in the string are deleted. If the first instance does not have spaces none of them are deleted. Do you think there may be a fix for this? I was thinking I could split the string up at each space and then test each cell with your formula or just delete all of the "-" in the cells with more then 1 characters. After this I could reassemble the string. It seems "Text to Columns" could do this a little cleaner but both seem sloppy with strings that can have up to 15 spaces.