Cleaning Cells

[jomili]

I have access to a pivot table. From the pivot I can get to the source data. In the source data, I'm trying to use a formula to put a value in a cell. The current form of the formula I'm trying to use is this:

=IF(AND(ISBLANK(CLEAN(AL2)),ISBLANK(CLEAN(AH2)),ISBLANK(AI2)),"DE","")

The purpose of the formula is to check if AL, AH and AI are blank, and if so, put "DE" in the formula cell. The problem is there's "Something" in those cells. My formula WAS

=IF(AND(ISBLANK(AL2),ISBLANK(AH2),ISBLANK(AI2)),"DE","")

. That formual doesn't work unless I click into AL, AH, and AI and hit delete. I've already removed any blank spaces in the cell, and I did LEN to assure myself there were no characters in the cell. Still the formula didn't work unless I deleted the contents of each empty cell.

So, I tried with TRIM, and with CLEAN. With those two, the formula wouldn't work, period. So, something is in those cells, and I need to know how to clean them out, because there are about 40K lines to clean.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
John