Maybe this will help you ???
http://www.rondebruin.nl/clean.htm

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


--
Regards Ron de Bruin
http://www.rondebruin.nl



"Iain Scott" <Iain wrote in message ...
Hello,

I am using Excel 2003. I have imported data from an old DOS database (don't
know name of it). This data comes from another department in a column
spreadsheet format and I have no control over how it is presented to me.

I transfer this data to Excel and try to work on it. I discover lots of
spaces after each field item eg intead of a word being clean as in "data"
(with four characters) I get "data " the word with additional but blank
characters. This problem exists in all the columns within the Excel sheet I
am working on.

An additional problem is if I clean the data by doing a find-replace. It
initially looks OK but if I then try to calculate with this corrected data I
get no results eg countif data should give a sensible result but it gives me
no result at all.

A sillier example would be as in countif "male" and countif "female". Say
this should be 50/50 = 100 on average but I am getting 50 male but 100 female
= 150 which is not sensible.

How please can I get around these problems? I am having to print out the
database and re-enter everything manually into a fresh Excel worksheet which
is taking me a vast number of hours each time.

Iain Scott