If you go to edit a 'blank' cell you may find ' in the cell already. This
is used at the start of the cell to indicate left alignment and in that
position it is a non-printable character. (A second instance would be
printable). These are imported as a filler when importing data (I know not
why) and can cause some confusion.

One way (?the best way) to eliminate these is to sort each column (for ease
of bringing them all together) and pasting a true blank cell over them. The
problem with this is that when sorted back, you will have discontinuous
columns and rows and thing like <Shift<Page<Down will take you to the
boundary of a blank / used cell not the extreme of the column or row.
Sorting and other functions may also be affected.

Regards.

Bill Ridgeway
Computer Solutions

"Joohn Calder" <Joohn wrote in message
...
Hi

I run Windows 2000 with Excell 2000. I have recently downloaded a large
amouth of data from an Access Database and put in to an Excel spreadsheet.
There are numerous blank cells scattered throughout the data. I discovered
that when doing some formuals that referenced these cells I was getting
errors. I soon discovered that ifI deleted the contents of the blank cell
this would fix the problem, so obviously there is something in the cells
that
I cannot see. At first I thought it was probably a "space" that was in the
cell but this was not the case. I also thought maybe it was white
formatted
text but this was also not the case. When the curser in in the cell there
is
nothing showing in the edit bar. What I did notice was that if I just
"placed" the curser on the cell and placed the curser in the edit bar and
selected ok then it would remove the contents of the cell (whatever they
were)

As anyone any ideas on "what" and how I can remove these "invisible"
entries
easily without doing it indiviually. I could just sort each column of the
database then delete everthing below the data but as there are many
columns
this would take a long time.


Thanks