VLOOKUP NOT WORKING WHEN I DOWNLOAD TEXT FROM INTERNET - format different?

[sobrien1234]

I am copying and pasting the form from this site into excel -

http://www.thegreyhoundrecorder.com.au/form-guides/addington/long-form/61154/all

The name of the dog "Jay Grim" should be in c40. It should also appear further down in B49.

When I try to vlookup the b49 name with the c40 name they are not registering as the same. There doesn't appear to be any difference in them (no spaces etc.) but I must be missing something - i.e. they must be in a different format?

Any trouble shooting suggestions?

 

[steve the fish]

They arent the same. Go to the website. Press CTRL-A. You will see the additional character in the bottom one.

 

[Joe4]

Many times, when data is downloaded from the internet, it contains extra "special" characters that need to be cleaned up. They are often invisible (as they usually are special "non-breaking" spaces).
The easiest way to see if this is going on is to check the length of these fields downloaded from the internet.

Let's say that the downloaded entry of "Jay Grim" is in cell B2. Then enter this formula in any blank cell:
=LEN(B2)
It should return 8. If it returns anything more than that, you have some of these extra characters.
They are usually at the end, so you can find what they are with this formula:

=CODE(RIGHT(B2,1))

which returns the ASCII character value of the last character in that entry.
You can then look up the code to see what it is: https://www.asciitable.com/