Excel/Access non-display character?

Factual Questions
41

If you search for a different ASCII code, it will not find the TABs that are causing you a problem. Maybe Word needs an option to make tabs/spaces/newlines visible and/or searchable? I haven’t used Word since, like, 1990, so I am not the one to tell you how the current version behaves.

But I can absolutely tell you that you should not be editing text files in Word, which is supposed to be a basic word processor; at any rate, not if it doesn’t work. Text editors are specifically designed to edit text files; you say you have already been doing this from within Notepad. If that is for some reason inadequate, Notepad++ has an option to search for Tabs by typing instead of typing them directly, and it also supports regular expressions.

42

You can enter a tab character on either a PC or a Mac by simply pressing the TAB key on your keyboard. But that probably won’t help because most programs treat TAB specially and switch fields or something rather than entering a literal tab. You said only a handful of fields have this problem so I say your best bet at this point is to open the xlsx in Excel and open the csv in notepad, look for the quotes in the csv file, then go back to the corresponding field in Excel and remove the tabs manually. And +1 to what DPRK said, if you use Word at any point in handling these files, you’re asking for trouble.