Unknown Characters

[Maccas]

I have inputed a business file that contains lines of code, the input file is not an .xls file it is a .rpt file from a program called HandyPak. I was told that i could input the file successfully, and it did so except for one thing. It is showing this symbol □ at the beginning of each row in the stock code. I simply want to remove this symbol and i have tried using the built in replace function in MS Excel, but the symbol does not appear.

Any Ideas???

[Bryan Hessey]

My first suggestion would be to highlight and copy the character, then Paste it into the 'find what' of the Edit, Replace, and Replace-All with nothing.
(Note, a small square as shown usually means that the character is not valid in the font currently being used)

Alternatively you could use the Clean function, as
=Clean(A1)
(and fomula-copy this down the column) into a helper column, copy this helper column and Paste Special, Values to a second helper column, then remove the original and first helper columns.

Or you coold copy the character and use it as a seperator in Data, Text to Columns, (delimited) next, tick 'Other' and paste the character.

If this fails, you could open the original file in Notepad to drop or replace the character, but this would require re-inputting the file.

Finally you could open the file in a binary editor such as UEdit and replace the character with a space, then re-input the file.

Hope this helps






Maccas I have inputed a business file that contains lines of code, the input file is not an .xls file it is a .rpt file from a program called HandyPak. I was told that i could input the file successfully, and it did so except for one thing. It is showing this symbol □ at the beginning of each row in the stock code. I simply want to remove this symbol and i have tried using the built in replace function in MS Excel, but the symbol does not appear.

Any Ideas??