Forum Discussion
Merge not working despite identical value
If you can copy from Extracted Data into Name Variations and it works, but doesn't until you do that, they are not the same values. One of the most insidious causes of this is the non-breaking space, ASCII 160 vs the normal space char of ASCII 32. You cannot see it unless you have a text editor like NotePad++ and turn on visibility to all chars.
If that is what it is, or similar, you need to copy that char to the clipboard, then on that column, do Transform, Replace Values, and paste that into the Value to Find box and type in a simple space in the Replace With box.
Another alternative is to do a fuzzy merge. The default is .8, so turn it up to .9 or even .95 and see if it will merge without any find/replace.
The function that encodes text as numbers returns 032 for both spaces in each of the names. I tested that function with a nbsp, and it returns 160, so that isn't it. Good thinking, though.
Fuzzy matching isn't an option for this dataset.
You are going to have to share data via Dropbox from a text file then or some other way. Pasting in the forum can strip the info out.