Unknown Character Creation/Deletion

[jomili]

One of my users, when saving an Excel spreadsheet from our shared drive to her local desktop, has her data changed by the addition of an unknown character in the front of many columns (but not all). See the example attached.

If I do a Text to Columns with one of these columns I wind up with 2 empty columns. If I do a TRIM function on one of these columns I end up with an empty colum. If I do a COPY of the character, I can paste it in to do a Find and Replace. All I've found I CAN do is a CLEAN, which seems to do the trick.

My question is, how do we prevent this from happening? Why is the data changing?

Any help is greatly appreciated.