Title: Excel: When “Identical” Cells Don’t MATCH - Strategic Finance
Headings: Excel: When “Identical” Cells Don’t MATCH
Technology |
Excel: When “Identical” Cells Don’t MATCH
TRAILING SPACES
NONBREAKING SPACES
REPLACING NONBREAKING SPACES
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Content: Why is the MATCH function not seeing them as a match? TRAILING SPACES
Whenever I encounter a VLOOKUP or MATCH function failing, my first impulse is that one cell has trailing spaces. The quick way to test is to select cell A2 and press the F2 key to put the cell in Edit mode. Then check if the flashing insertion cursor is next to the last letter or if it’s a space or more to the right of the last letter. You also could use a formula such as =LEN (A2) and =LEN (D3) to learn how many characters are in each cell. If you do encounter spaces at the end of one column and not the other column, use a formula such as =TRIM (A2) to remove extra spaces. TRIM will remove any leading spaces or trailing spaces and will replace repeated spaces with a single space. For example, =TRIM (“ FIRST LAST ”) would return FIRST LAST. Enter the TRIM formula in a blank column adjacent to your data. Copy the cells containing the TRIM formula and use Paste Values to replace the original data with the corrected data.