How to I tell excel not to recognize charcters that are not there.

[bjwoodruff]

A server feeds information into my workbook that is needed to find other peices of information in other workbooks. The problem is that when the names are inputed into the first book the names have extra charcters that do not show up. They are blank. The reason why I want to get rid of these is because that cells contents needs to be copied so it can be searched in another book. These "ghost" charcters are comming up in the search and will not find the items I need.
I hope I explained my problem correctly.

Benjamin Woodruff

[duane]

have you tried the trim function?