sometimes when you download external data some unprintable characters from
the original page creep in. refer to this url

http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/join.htm

you can even findout what speical characters have crept in by using
pearson's <cellview addin.

hope these will be of help to you

sriramna wrote in message
ps.com...
I am trying a similar application (here I am fetching entire word lists
for flashcard training). I'm surprised more people haven't encountered
this problem.

There does not appear to be any hope for it except to post-process the
returned data. I recorded a macro for this:

Sub SubSpecialChars()
With Cells
..Replace What:="ä", Replacement:="ä", _
LookAt:=xlPart, _
SearchOrder :=xlByRows, MatchCase:=True, _
SearchFormat:=False, ReplaceFormat:=False

..Replace What:="ö", Replacement:="ö"

..Replace What:="ü", Replacement:="ü"
End With
End Sub

I'm afraid the substitutions were determined just by inspection; I
don't know of the logic for this.

David Sloman wrote:
Hi.

I've got a web query which goes off and translates a list of words
within a sheet - it works quite nicely, except any special characters
seem to get messed up in the process.

For example, if I navigate to the website directly and enter a word
to
translate ("Invalid" in this example), I am correctly returned
"Unzulässig". However in Excel this gets changed to
"Unzulässiger".

Anyone have any ideas what I can try to get the correct character
formatting?