Special Characters not found in 'Find & Select' nor with 'Advanced Filters'.

Copper Contributor

Hello,

 

I was wondering if anyone has advice on how to solve a particular issue I am facing. I am doing text analysis in RStudio using an Excel dataset. RStudio is showing certain terms like "pdf\ \", "\ C\", and "C\ \" as frequently appearing terms but had issues where the sub syntax is not working. I then planned to go to the Excel file and 'Find & Select' these terms out, but Excel cannot find them either. I, then, used 'Advanced Filters' and was still unable to locate these terms. My dataset is large, and therefore it would be extremely time-consuming to try and find these through a visual examination, especially if it yields no progress. Does anyone have any advice on ways to avoid going through all of the data?

1 Reply

@WilliamJEames 

Find special characters in subsyntax in Excel.

According to the search results, there is no easy way to do this.

How to Find Special Characters in Excel (3 Easy Methods)

Format text or numbers as superscript or subscript

 

A possible solution is:

Convert the cells with subsyntax to regular text cells

Use the find and replace function or a formula like

=SUMPRODUCT(–ISNUMBER(SEARCH({"!","#","$","%","(",")","^","@ ","[","]","{","}"}, A2)))>0

to find special characters

Convert the cells back to subsyntax

 

I hope this helps you.