Thank you very much to both of you. I now know how to remove the vertical
lines and can write a macro to do that for me. I am trying to create macros
for copying cell ranges between two worksheets and workbooks. I have other
posts addressing the problems I'm having with that too. If you can help
there it would be very much appreciated.

Living and learning more than I want to?

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

And on my USA keyboard, I have a (broken) vertical bar on the backslash key
(shift-backslash key). It's directly above the Enter key.

I don't know why the columnwidths would go wacky, though.

Saved from a previous post:

Chip Pearson has a very nice addin that will help determine what that
character(s) is:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/CellView.aspx

You may be able to use Edit|Replace to change the character--Some characters can
be entered by holding the alt-key and typing the hex number on the numeric
keypad. For example, alt-0010 (or ctrl-j) can be used for linefeeds. But I've
never been able to get alt-0013 to work for carriage returns.

Another alternative is to fix it via a formula:

=substitute(a1,char(##),"")
or
=substitute(a1,char(##)," ")

Replace ## with the ASCII value you see in Chip's addin.

Or you could use a macro (after using Chip's CellView addin):

Option Explicit
Sub cleanEmUp()

Dim myBadChars As Variant
Dim myGoodChars As Variant
Dim iCtr As Long

myBadChars = Array(Chr(##), Chr(##)) '<--What showed up in CellView?

myGoodChars = Array(" ","") '<--what's the new character, "" for nothing?

If UBound(myGoodChars) < UBound(myBadChars) Then
MsgBox "Design error!"
Exit Sub
End If

For iCtr = LBound(myBadChars) To UBound(myBadChars)
ActiveSheet.Cells.Replace What:=myBadChars(iCtr), _
Replacement:=myGoodChars(iCtr), _
LookAt:=xlPart, SearchOrder:=xlByRows, _
MatchCase:=False
Next iCtr

End Sub

If you're new to macros:

Debra Dalgleish has some notes how to implement macros he
http://www.contextures.com/xlvba01.html

David McRitchie has an intro to macros:
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/getstarted.htm

Ron de Bruin's intro to macros:
http://www.rondebruin.nl/code.htm

(General, Regular and Standard modules all describe the same thing.)

Challenger wrote:

Can't find the vertical line character anywhere to place in the find/replace.
Can delete from each cell in the formula bar, but then the column widths go
whacky.

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

Edit|Replace???

Challenger wrote:

I have a spreadsheet that has been formatted from a Crystal Report. There is
a vertical text line at the right hand side of several of the cells. I want
a quick way to remove these lines so that the data can be copied and used in
formulas and macros.

--

Dave Peterson


--

Dave Peterson