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Importing data to excel - with an apostrophe?

  1. #1
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    Importing data to excel - with an apostrophe?

    Hi
    Newbie here - so I hope this gets posted ok, I am a frequent user of excel and at reasonably knowledgable level.
    When importing data into excell, each cell has an apostrophe before the data even though the apostrophe was not on the original text.
    If you look at the text in the cell, you cannot see the apostrophe, but if you look at the same text in the function bar you can see it. Bizarre! This affects all text, be it numbers, dates, text, postcodes etc. I have hundreds of rows and several columns so there are thousands of cells. I want to get rid of the apostrophe without editing individual cells.
    In the cell the text will appear like this: Surrey
    But in the function bar it will appear like this: 'Surrey
    The data is imported from a non excel database.
    can anyone help?

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    Forum Expert tigeravatar's Avatar
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    Re: Importing data to excel - with an apostrophe?

    NiscayahSteve,

    WIthout a macro, I could only remove leading apostrophes from numbers, but not text. In order to get it to happen on text also, I used the following macro:

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    Notes:
    -Before running the macro, highight everything in the worksheet (CTRL+A once or twice should highlight it all)

    Hope that helps,
    ~tigeravatar

  3. #3
    Forum Expert martindwilson's Avatar
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    Re: Importing data to excel - with an apostrophe?

    just put 0 in a spare cell
    copy
    select all your data
    paste special/add
    or when importing make sure the wizard sets the cells as general not text
    Last edited by martindwilson; 04-16-2011 at 10:13 AM.
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  4. #4
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    Re: Importing data to excel - with an apostrophe?

    1 select all cells at old w/sheet then copy
    2 insert new w/sheet, select cell a1, then paste special value
    3 delete old w/sheet

    hopefully it works

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