I regularly export and import text data into and out of Excel, Word and
Access. Lately a good deal of the text I have been exporting to be posted on
websites shows up with characters (apostrophes and quotation marks) being
displayed as '?'s. Any thoughts and how I can scrub this, or remedy it?

Mark H wrote:

> I regularly export and import text data into and out of Excel, Word and
> Access. Lately a good deal of the text I have been exporting to be posted
> on websites shows up with characters (apostrophes and quotation marks)
> being
> displayed as '?'s. Any thoughts and how I can scrub this, or remedy it?

Most Office programs (except Access) will replace normal single and double-
quote characters with "Smart quotes". These are the curly or angled
versions that go in different directions depending on the context.

XML and web pages really do not like these characters without some extra
work regarding unicode and character encoding settings. I usually just try
to replace them with the standard characters at entry time.

I won't be surprised if your apostrophes and quotation marks have been
replaced with some fancy characters by the Autocorrect feature of either
Word, Access or Excel.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Windows Live Platform
Blog/web site: http://coding-paparazzi.sylvainlafontaine.com
Independent consultant and remote programming for Access and SQL-Server
(French)


"Mark H" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:7817AC71-2AEB-4CE7-B67E-(E-Mail Removed)...
>I regularly export and import text data into and out of Excel, Word and
> Access. Lately a good deal of the text I have been exporting to be posted
> on
> websites shows up with characters (apostrophes and quotation marks) being
> displayed as '?'s. Any thoughts and how I can scrub this, or remedy it?

Rick, is there anyway to clean these out of Access once they have been
imported in from Word or Excel?

"Rick Brandt" wrote:

> Mark H wrote:
>
> > I regularly export and import text data into and out of Excel, Word and
> > Access. Lately a good deal of the text I have been exporting to be posted
> > on websites shows up with characters (apostrophes and quotation marks)
> > being
> > displayed as '?'s. Any thoughts and how I can scrub this, or remedy it?
>
> Most Office programs (except Access) will replace normal single and double-
> quote characters with "Smart quotes". These are the curly or angled
> versions that go in different directions depending on the context.
>
> XML and web pages really do not like these characters without some extra
> work regarding unicode and character encoding settings. I usually just try
> to replace them with the standard characters at entry time.
> .
>

Mark H wrote:

> Rick, is there anyway to clean these out of Access once they have been
> imported in from Word or Excel?

You could run update queries using the Replace() function.