There is an interesting function in Excel worksheets. I know that you are most likely thinking – well most of them are pretty interesting, but this particular function is interesting in that it makes sure that your text is clean. What do I mean by clean? Well it means that Excel makes sure that your text contains only printable characters and will remove certain non-printable characters and control codes that may be contained in the text in your worksheet.
The function syntax is pretty simple as you can see below:
=CLEAN (text)
You simply include the text or a reference to a cell that contains text.
Hmmm… you might ask why would you even clean your text?
Well if you import information from the Internet or some server other than your own, the non-printable characters could come along with whatever you have copied, which can cause you problems when you are attempting to view or print the information.
It’s always good to be clean right?
Interesting option, not one that I was aware of. But really, I like a free tool called GetPlainText [Link removed by admin – leads to a site rated Red (high risk) by MSA] that will work with any Windows application. I have it pinned to the Task Bar in Windows 7, just highlight the text in whatever application I want to copy from, click on the GetPlainText icon, and paste the clean text. Simple, straightforward, has worked with every application I have tried it with so far. And as I said, free.