Unknown Character Creation/Deletion

[jomili]

One of my users, when saving an Excel spreadsheet from our shared drive to her local desktop, has her data changed by the addition of an unknown character in the front of many columns (but not all). See the example attached.

If I do a Text to Columns with one of these columns I wind up with 2 empty columns. If I do a TRIM function on one of these columns I end up with an empty colum. If I do a COPY of the character, I can paste it in to do a Find and Replace. All I've found I CAN do is a CLEAN, which seems to do the trick.

My question is, how do we prevent this from happening? Why is the data changing?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[optkontek]

I suggest you try zipping the file - just to see if it is really the transfer that is doign it. Does it happen if she opens the file in her local Excel installation directly form the shared drive? I'd also check if you can reproduce this with someone else's computer than your client's. It may be something with her configuration that is messing stuff up (regional options tend to destroy things now and then - both within excel and the windows config). Just a few ideas... good luck!

[jomili]

I like the Zipped solution, but am more interested in what the possible cause could be. She told me what she did was to open the workbook, do a save as to her local drive (the WB is a read-only), close the file, and reopen. That's when it went haywire. I had her copy the file directly from the shared drive without opening, and that worked well, no problems.