Thursday, February 21, 2008

Merge data - part #2

Things that go 'bump' in the night --things that go wrong

One thing that has happened to us -- is that we have the formula right -- it just won;t work ... after repeated attempts ...ahh ... what is wrong ... the data may have INVISIBLE characters - especially if you are pulling data from IBM AS400 or similar computers.

Here is how to clean your data .... in a NEW column use this formula -- =TRIM(CLEAN( your data cell here ))
Then PASTE SPECIAL ... using VALUES ONLY and paste the cleaned data back ONTO the original data ... and delete the new column you used to clean the data in.

Another problem --if you are working WITHIN the same work book --- sheet 1 and sheet 2 .... the formula will not automatically ADD the dollar sign to FIX the points of data you are starting and ending with in the comparison. You will need to add this manually. This is NOT a problem if you use two different work books

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