title: remove all non printing characters from spreadsheet
body: <p>I need to import the data in an Excel spreadsheet to SQL Server 2008. 88 columns and about 5 thousand rows.</p>
  
  <p>All sorts of hidden characters seem to be causing problems.</p>
  
  <p>I have no experience of Excel. I read that CLEAN(A1) will remove all non printing characters from the cell.</p>
  
  <p>How do you remove non printing characters from a whole spreadsheet?</p>
  
  <p>Will CLEAN remove the double inverted commas that appear around some of the data when I import it into SQL Server (these are not visible in the spreadsheet). These seem to cause issues. In SQL Server you see a double inverted comma at the beginning of the field, but the data is truncated etc.</p>