There is one way to clean HTML characters from your data but you will
have to do it at a time for one column,
1)select the column in which you have HTML characters then press Ctrl+C


to copy the column.
2) then open (windows) NOTEPAD press Ctrl+V to paste your data in
NOTEPAD.
3) then press Ctrl+H to find and replace the HTML characters.
4) just select one of the HTML character normaly it should be in the
end of every line copy it then paste it as value of Find what:
5) don't put any thing in Replace with: value press replace all .
6) press Ctrl+A to copy all and paste it back in excel column.
Actully NOTEPAD can recognise those characters which excel can't.

Regards,
Khan

Peo Sjoblom wrote:
The clean function won't remove invisible html characters which usually is
the culprit when trim does not work
thus I gave a link to a macro that will remove all obsolete characters
including the characters that CLEAN will remove

--


Regards,

Peo Sjoblom

Excel 95 - Excel 2007
Northwest Excel Solutions
www.nwexcelsolutions.com




"Sasa Stankovic" wrote in message
...
Well, TRIM function might not work just good enought because it cleans
spaces but it doesnt clean HIDDEN characters! For that job there is CLEAN
function!
So your VLOOKUP should be little modify:
=VLOOKUP(A2,CLEAN(range),column_index,0)



"Peo Sjoblom" wrote in message
...
You can run a macro

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


same site has instructions on how to install macros

if the extra character is a space you can use

=VLOOKUP(A2,TRIM(range),column_index,FALSE)

replace A2 with your lookup value and range with your lookup table

entered with ctrl + shift & enter


--


Regards,

Peo Sjoblom

Excel 95 - Excel 2007
Northwest Excel Solutions
www.nwexcelsolutions.com



"Ekazakoff" wrote in message
...
I did find I have hidden characters. How do I get rid of them?
"Ekazakoff" wrote:

I am getting #N/A errors even when I have an apparently exact match in
my
table array to the lookup value. I know that excel requires the
formats to
be exactly the same and I can force the match if I copy the lookup
value from
my table array and paste it into the worksheet. Is there an easy way
to
"fix" my table array. The table array is a reference worksheet I
have
created which has worked in the past.