Forum Discussion
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
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.
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.