CODEWITHSUNDEEP
excel
ZealousHypocrites
ZealousHypocrites

Reputation: 202

Difference between apostrophes?

We have over 80,000 titles in our database. I am tasked with handling/upgrading the related Excel sheets that we use to review and gather information from the database. This involves LOTS of string comparisons. Consider the following title:

A Cook's Tour: San Sebastian: A Food Lover’s Town

The current sheet I am working on was unable to match that to the database to pull it's corresponding serial number. Why? They had in the sheet the following:

A Cook's Tour: San Sebastian: A Food Lover's Town

So in the sheet they had what I recognize as the same symbol I can type on my keyboard, the ', for both uses of the apostrophe but the other one is different and I can currently only copy it: ’

Where does that second one come from and what is the difference between them? Will one cause specific problems in certain areas over the other, or are they both basically identical?

Basically I am just trying to get a handle on what, if any, issues I need to be aware of when doing any sort of standard stuff in Excel regarding these differing symbols.

Note: I cannot change the names already in the database. I cannot remove the ’. The names are, unfortunately, the value used in many workers' sheets to keep track of the title. Changing the names in the DB would break an unknown amount of links across and unknown amount of workers' sheets, across our entire company worldwide. (As in I've never met most of the people that my work affects kind of "far reaching" implications if you change just a simple thing in the DB.)

I must simply work with the existing data which is basically spoon fed directly from the source(s) of the material, which is why strange titles like the first example are entered into the DB. Once time for billing comes around and we have to go back to the sources we need exactly THEIR name for the title otherwise they come back to us with "it's not matching our records!" IMO it should be a secondary field to be pulled no different than any other meta and we should have a standard ourselves (AND no one should be using anything but the serial number to keep track of their titles because that cannot change no matter how many times the title is edited, but good luck convincing everyone else! [I've TRIED])...but I'm not the boss.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1325

Answers (1)

durbnpoisn
durbnpoisn

Reputation: 4669

Moved to an answer:

It's because the apostrophe character at the front of a cell forces Excel to change the formatting to a character, even though it would normally be a number or cell reference. So if you have a list of codes that say things like "=b5", that would resolve to the value of B5. But if you do it like this: '=b5 The text "=b5" will show. It's a good trick to know. But not very helpful in your case.

The "smart" character is not defined in Excel that way, and therefore won't change how the cell resolves.

Where does it come from? The character itself comes from MS Office. Usually Word or PowerPoint. They try to be fancy. So when you type something in quotes, it auto-swaps the character to the "smart" one - opposite facing on either side. It's supposed to be helpful.

If you're having trouble with people sending stuff to you like this, do a global search and replace on that character.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions