Forum Discussion
Identical values counted as distinct. Why?
Hi guys
Here's a list of distinct values in a column I have:
I can't make head nor tail of it. I am fascinated to find out why there are two distinct blanks, and two distinct versions of 'Very dissatisfied'. Is there any way I can find out exactly what is it that makes these values distinct from eachother? Excel is convinced they are distinct also - and the only thing that's making this very difficult is that I cannot find a way to find out how they are different.
Thanks
Hi Marcel
Thanks very much. I should have stated in the initial post that I had already checked for trailing spaces - though I didn't know about impossible characters.
Just to complete the thread, what I have ended up doing is c+p the two distinct versions into Word, and switch on 'Show formatting Marks'. This came back with:
So at least now I can sleep peacefully :)
6 Replies
Typically this is due to trailing spaces and/or unprintable characters.
You can try and use trim and clean in the query editor, transform tab, format.
Hi Marcel
Thanks very much. I should have stated in the initial post that I had already checked for trailing spaces - though I didn't know about impossible characters.
Just to complete the thread, what I have ended up doing is c+p the two distinct versions into Word, and switch on 'Show formatting Marks'. This came back with:
So at least now I can sleep peacefully :)
Maybe you can mark your previous post as answer first.
Hi Marcel,
I am having the same issue but have already checked for leading and trailing 0s and trimmed and cleaned the field. By looking at the report level filters, I can see that one of my identical values has only 5 items, which I can say are the 5 that I recently manually changed in my database. I don't see any differences in either edit queries or in my excel sheet. Do you know what else could be causing this?
