How to delete Certain Characters in a excel 2010 cell

Question

In column A I have a load of name that look like this

[John Smith]

I still want them in A but the [] removed...

Answer 1

If [John Smith] is in cell A1, then use this formula to do what you want:

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1, "[", ""), "]", "")

The inner SUBSTITUTE replaces all instances of "[" with "" and returns a new string, then the other SUBSTITUTE replaces all instances of "]" with "" and returns the final result.