In the 3rd column, right click and “Paste Special” and select “Values”.Right click and copy all the cells in this column. The second column will populate with the cleaned up MAC addresses using the friendly format that Cisco devices like.You will need to do a “Find and Replace” (control F in Excel) to find any “-” or “:” and replace them with an empty character In the first column, paste in your nasty list of MAC addresses.

I did some quick research and created an Excel workbook that takes the pain out of “improperly” formatted MAC addresses.Ĭlick here to download the Excel Workbook (Cisco MAC Converter.xlsx) Also, this left room for user mistakes and fat fingering errors. I briefly worked at a company that needed constant VLAN membership changes (sometimes 50 or more endpoints at a time) I realized that simply typing MAC addresses to something a Cisco switch can understand would make up the majority of the time spent on the issue.

Unfortunately, everyone seems to have their own idea of what a MAC address should look like. You will see on Windows systems, MAC addresses divided by dashes (00-50-56-a0-6e-db) other systems may use colons (c0:3f:d5:bd:22:64) etc.

Ever get a really long nasty list of MAC addresses that aren’t in the format that Cisco network devices crave?

How to convert mac address