Identical values counted as distinct. Why?

[AoJueMing]

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

[MarcelBeug]

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.

[Anonymous]

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?

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I have found my error! I created a sort by column that sadly was not connected to the column it was sorting, so it was placing my 5 manually edit entries in a different position. In case someone else runs across this issue again...

[AoJueMing · Accepted solution]

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 🙂

[MarcelBeug]

Maybe you can mark your previous post as answer first.

[AoJueMing]

Pardon?

edit: Thanks for Kudo - feels like a bit of a cheat though (:

Will close thread.