Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Converting to ASCII Text.
Brenda has a lot of information that has been imported or pasted into a worksheet. Sometimes the text in the worksheet will contain "foreign" and strange characters. She wonders if there is a way to easily convert the data so that it contains no non-ASCII characters and, perhaps, some foreign characters are converted to regular ASCII values (such as converting accented letters to non-accented letters).
There are a couple of things you can try. First, you can use the CLEAN worksheet function to get rid of non-printable characters. Just use the function in this manner:
=CLEAN(A1)
The result is "cleaned" text, without the non-printables. If you want to replace foreign characters with regular ASCII characters, that will need to be done with a macro. Here's an example of a relatively straightforward approach:
Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: 
Sub StripAccent()
Dim sAcc As String
Dim sReg As String
Dim sA As String
Dim sR As String
Dim i As Integer
sAcc = "������������������������������������������������������������"
sReg = "SZszYAAAAAACEEEEIIIIDNOOOOOUUUUYaaaaaaceeeeiiiidnooooouuuuyy"
For i = 1 To Len(sAcc)
sA = Mid(sAcc, i, 1)
sR = Mid(sReg, i, 1)
Selection.Replace What:=sA, Replacement:=sR, _
LookAt:=xlPart, MatchCase:=True
Next
End Sub
The macro steps through the characters in the sAcc variable and, one at a time, uses Find and Replace to replace them with the corresponding character in the sReg variable. You can adjust the contents of sAcc and sReg to reflect your conversion needs; the key is to make sure that they are both the same length.
Note:
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11492) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Converting to ASCII Text.
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2018-11-22 14:24:52
Lily marconnet
I tried the clean function but its not working for me :( anything else you could advise? thank you!
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