You cleaned up all the first names

Using the SUBSTITUTE formula, you had Excel grab the ^ symbol from each first name and replace it with nothing, which you specified by two quotation marks ("").

Lots of different software lets you get rid of crummy characters by replacing those characters with nothing.

To make the original first name data go away forever copy the H column and then Paste Special > Values to turn these values into actual text rather than formula outputs. After that you can delete the FirstName column so that you never have to see those pesky ^ symbols again.