Forum Discussion
Verushka
Jan 05, 2023Copper Contributor
Show special hidden characters in excel
Hi, how do I make excel show hidden characters, such as spaces, line breaks or paragraph breaks, like in Word? Thanks
NevPercy
Mar 17, 2026Copper Contributor
Copying and pasting into Word might be a bit too obvious, and might result in trash formats, but it will be enough to let you have an initial scan of what you might have in your Excel content.
- CattailabroadMar 30, 2026Occasional Reader
This does not work either. I tried everything. The only way I found what the non-printing characters was by pasting the contents of the spreadsheet into Notepad++ and turning on "show blanks" or something similar. Once I knew what the non-printing spaces were I looked up the excel code for those and searched for them and replaced them.
Ultimately, I created a little function in R to strip them but keep other non-asci characters I needed to keep.