Removing non-printing characters from text in Excel using VBA

August 16, 2018Posted inUser Defined Function
Removing non-printing characters from text in Excel using VBA

Have you ever encountered a perfectly constructed MATCH or a VLOOKUP function failing for no apparent reason? Have you had VBA tell you that a file does not exist even though it does? You may have non-printing characters to blame. There are notorious space-like characters that are invisible to the naked eye, which sneak in when you are importing data from Web Pages, Word Documents or PDFs. In this post we will learn more about these characters and how to remove them from your data.

How to deal with the Numbers Stored As Text Error in Excel?

August 11, 2014Posted inMacros, Tips and Tricks22 Comments
How to deal with the Numbers Stored As Text Error in Excel?

How many times have you encountered the “Numbers Stored as text” error in your data sets? It interferes with your LOOKUP and MATCH functions, and arithmetic calculations. Excel has a Convert to Number functionality to help with this situation, but it could be a lot better. You have to deal with your columns one at a time, sometimes one cell at a time. Also, I noticed that if the dataset is huge, excel takes a lot of time to push through; occasionally, it is so slow that you can see the cells getting updated one by one.