Possible hidden non-printable character removal

xdriver

Board Regular
Joined
Mar 21, 2014
Messages
73
Office Version
  1. 365
Platform
  1. MacOS
Here is a snippit of one of my sheets. If I select a column it counts every single column, not just the ones with data in them. If I select a bunch of "empty" cells, and click delete, then the count will be reduced by the number of cells I selected. I tried copying "empty" cells, and pasting it into View non-printable unicode characters but receive nothing because there is nothing in the cells to select. How can I clean up my sheet of non printable characters?

natickmlspublicrecords.xlsx
XYZAAABACAD
1Creation DateExteriorFireplacesFirst Floor SqftFirst NameFoundationFuel Type
2
3
4CHRISTOPHER
5ALVNL11336MICHAELOIL
6
7
8ELLEN G
9
10
11
12ALVNL1768JOHN WELEC
Sheet1
 
It wouldn't hurt, but it won't get rid of non-printing characters.
 
Upvote 0

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It wouldn't hurt, but it won't get rid of non-printing characters.
@Fluff,

I'm confused. How was his problem not non-printing characters? Is there a difference between non-printing and zero-length characters? And I know that his before cell format was text and your macro changed it to General, does .Value only affect non text formatted cells?
 
Upvote 0
Non printing characters are things like line feeds, non-breaking spaces etc, rather than null strings
 
Upvote 0
If you really don't want to use VBA, Text to Columns will reset the null strings to back to being Empty/Blank cells.
It will only let you do 1 column at a time though, so VBA is much more efficient.
 
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