How to Create a URL Slug from a Title in Excel

Turn blog titles into lowercase, hyphenated URL slugs — removing punctuation and doubled spaces — and build the full page URL.

You will learn to

• Convert a title to a lowercase, hyphenated slug
• Strip punctuation with nested SUBSTITUTE
• Clean spaces and build a full URL

How it works

A slug is the readable part of a URL: "Spring Garden Checklist" becomes "spring-garden-checklist". The core formula lowercases the title and swaps spaces for hyphens: =LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(A2," ","-")). That alone handles most titles and is ideal for preparing redirects or a CMS import.

Punctuation such as apostrophes, colons and question marks should be removed first — nest one SUBSTITUTE per character: SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"'",""),":",""). Always TRIM the title before replacing spaces, or doubled and trailing spaces turn into "--" and dangling hyphens.

=LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(A2," ","-"))