The CHAR function is categorized under Excel Text Functions. It returns a character specified by a number. As a financial analyst, the CHAR function is useful in coding page numbers received from other files into characters, or when we wish to insert a line break into text. You’re probably aware that you can find ASCII characters using numeric codes. For example, to find an e with an acute accent, you could do this: 1. Click the “Edit” menu. Click “Find.” 3. In the “Find What” box, enter ^0233 (on a PC) or ^0142 (on a Mac). Click the “Find Next” button. You can learn more about this here. CHAR Function in Excel is a function that returns the character specified by the code number (also called the ASCII code) from the character set for your computer. CHAR is categorized as String/Text Function. It takes ASCII value as an input number and gives the character associated with that ASCII value as an output. Click on the Special Characters tab. Click on the special character you wish to use. Click on the Insert button to use the special character in the selected cell. Once inserted the Cancel button will change to the Close button, when you are done, click Close to return to the spreadsheet. You may not need special characters in day-to-day operations, but once in a while if the need arises, you now know how to get it done quickly. The feature certainly covers most of the special characters you may ever need. To test whether you have got it correctly, comment a special character below. Related articles.

• Excel Find Special Character
• Excel For Mac Find Special Characters List
• Remove Special Characters Excel

We know that TRIM and CLEAN Excel functions are used to clean up unprintable characters and extra spaces from strings but they don't help much in identifying strings containing any special character like @ or ! etc. In such cases we use UDFs.

So if you want to know if a string contains any special characters, you will not find any Excel formula or function to do so. We can find the special characters that are on the keyboard by manually typing but you can't know if there are symbols in the string or not.

Finding any special characters can be very important for data cleaning purposes. And in some cases, it must be done. So how do we do this in Excel? How can we know if a string contains any special characters? Well, we can use UDF to do so.

Excel Find Special Character

The below formula will return TRUE if any cell contains any characters other than 1 to 0 and A to Z (in both cases). If it does not find any special characters it will return FALSE.

Generic Formula

=ContainsSpecialCharacters(string)

Excel For Mac Find Special Characters List

String: The string that you want to check for special characters.

For this formula to work, you will need to put the code below in the module of your workbook.

So open Excel. Press ALT+F11 to open VBE. Insert a module from the Insert menu. Copy the code below and paste it into the module.

Now the function is ready to be used.
Go to the worksheet in the workbook that contains the strings that you want to check.

Write the below formula in cell C2:

=ContainsSpecialCharacters(B13)

It returns TRUE for the first string since it contains a special character. When you copy the formula down it shows FALSE for B14 string and so on.

But strangely it shows TRUE for the last string 'Exceltip.com'. It is because it contains a dot (.). But why so? Let's examine the code to understand.

How does the function work?

We are iterating through all the characters of the string using the For loop and mid function of VBA. The Mid function extracts one character at a time from string and stores it into ch variable.

Now the main part comes. We use the select case statement to check what the ch variable contains.

We tell VBA to check if ch contains any of the defined values. I have defined 0 to 9, A to Z, a to z and ' ' (space). If c
h contains any of these, we set it's value to False.

You can see that we don't have a dot (.) on the list and this is why we get TRUE for the string that contains dot. You can add any character to the list to be exempt from the formula.

If ch contains any character other than the listed characters, we set the function's result to True and end the loop right there.

So yeah this how it works. But if you want to clean special characters, you will need to make some changes in the function.

How to Clean Special Characters From Strings in Excel?

To clean special characters from a string in Excel, I have created another custom function in VBA. The syntax of the function is:

=CleanSpecialCharacters(string)

This function returns a cleaned version of the string passed into it. The new string will not contain any of the special characters.

The code of this function goes like this:

Copy this in the same module you copied in the above code.

When you use this formula on the strings this is how the results will be:

You can see every special character is removed from the string including the dot.

How does it work?

Remove Special Characters Excel

It works the same as the above function. The only difference is this function replaces every special character with a null character. Forms a new string and returns this string.

If you want to exempt any character from getting cleaned, you can add it to the list in the code. Excel will pardon that special character.

So yeah guys, this is how you can find and replace special characters from a string in Excel. I hope this was explanatory enough and helpful. If it doesn't help you in solving your problem, let us know in the comments section below.

Related Articles:

How to Use TRIM function in Excel: The TRIM function is used to trim strings and clean any trailing or leading spaces from string. This helps us in the cleaning process of data a lot.

How to use the CLEAN function in Excel: Clean function is used to clean up unprintable characters from the string. This function is mostly used with the TRIM function to clean up imported foreign data.

Replace text from end of a string starting from variable position: To replace text from the end of the string, we use the REPLACE function. The REPLACE function uses the position of text in the string to replace it.

How to Check if a string contains one of many texts in Excel: To find check if a string contains any of multiple text, we use this formula. We use the SUM function to sum up all the matches and then perform a logic to check if the string contains any of the multiple strings.

Count Cells that contain specific text: A simple COUNTIF function will do the magic. To count the number of multiple cells that contain a given string we use the wildcard operator with the COUNTIF function.

Excel REPLACE vs SUBSTITUTE function: The REPLACE and SUBSTITUTE functions are the most misunderstood functions. To find and replace a given text we use the SUBSTITUTE function. Where REPLACE is used to replace a number of characters in string…

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I can't find it either, but the following appears to work:

1. Turn on Show Invisibles in the View menu.
2. Select (highlight) the double para breaks.
3. Use Command-E (Find using selected text).
4. Open the Find dialogue box (Command-F) and select Find & Replace.

   The selected para breaks will be in the Find text entry box, but will not be visible!

5. Click in the Replace text entry box.
6. Select (highlight) a single para break.
7. Go to the Edit menu / Find and select 'Use selection for replace' (it will not show in the Replace entry box).
8. In the Find & Replace dialogue box, click on the Forward or Back arrows to highlight the selected items (e.g. double para break) where you wish to start replacing in the document.
9. Use the Replace All / Replace & Find / Replace buttons as per usual.

Not a nice solution, but I hope it gets you going until Apple restores the previous functionality!

Oct 24, 2013 7:47 PM