Conditional Formatting-simple

[MCosca]

I am not understanding this and obviously doing something wrong because this sounds very simple

All I want to do is have the value in column N turn yellow if it doesnt equal the value in column J.

What am I doing wrong? The cell is yellow and stays

=n2<>j2

 

[Joe4]

I thought I had it figured out adding a step in the Macro, to TRIM the values but I must not have done it correctly because it still had the extra balnk spaces in column N.

Where did this data come from? Did it come from some external program or the web?
Sometimes, they have special characters (that are not normal spaces), so the TRIM function does not work on them.
Are these extra characters at the beginning or the end of each of the entries?

 

[DanteAmor]

This is the problem, in one cell you have the data as text and in the other cell you have the data as a number.

So either leave them the same or change the formula in the conditional formatting to this:

=TRIM(J2)=TRIM(N2)

In this way the 2 data will be converted to text.

Regards
Dante Amor