And on my USA keyboard, I have a (broken) vertical bar on the backslash key
(shift-backslash key). It's directly above the Enter key.
I don't know why the columnwidths would go wacky, though.
Saved from a previous post:
Chip Pearson has a very nice addin that will help determine what that
character(s) is:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/CellView.aspx
You may be able to use Edit|Replace to change the character--Some characters can
be entered by holding the alt-key and typing the hex number on the numeric
keypad. For example, alt-0010 (or ctrl-j) can be used for linefeeds. But I've
never been able to get alt-0013 to work for carriage returns.
Another alternative is to fix it via a formula:
=substitute(a1,char(##),"")
or
=substitute(a1,char(##)," ")
Replace ## with the ASCII value you see in Chip's addin.
Or you could use a macro (after using Chip's CellView addin):
Option Explicit
Sub cleanEmUp()
Dim myBadChars As Variant
Dim myGoodChars As Variant
Dim iCtr As Long
myBadChars = Array(Chr(##), Chr(##)) '<--What showed up in CellView?
myGoodChars = Array(" ","") '<--what's the new character, "" for nothing?
If UBound(myGoodChars) <> UBound(myBadChars) Then
MsgBox "Design error!"
Exit Sub
End If
For iCtr = LBound(myBadChars) To UBound(myBadChars)
ActiveSheet.Cells.Replace What:=myBadChars(iCtr), _
Replacement:=myGoodChars(iCtr), _
LookAt:=xlPart, SearchOrder:=xlByRows, _
MatchCase:=False
Next iCtr
End Sub
If you're new to macros:
Debra Dalgleish has some notes how to implement macros here:
http://www.contextures.com/xlvba01.html
David McRitchie has an intro to macros:
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/getstarted.htm
Ron de Bruin's intro to macros:
http://www.rondebruin.nl/code.htm
(General, Regular and Standard modules all describe the same thing.)
