Weird Character in Excel : Square box with Question Mark in it

Posted on December 20, 2012 by hammadk

If you ever copied data from SQL Server Management Studio to Excel 2007, you might have seen this weird character

This is probably caused by the fact that you used “Text to Column” feature of Excel before. If you used Text to Column feature using space as deliminator, this is what caused this bug. To fixed this go to Data tab in ribbon menu, select any column that has a value. Go to Text To column menu and choose tab as delimiter (comma and other might not work).

Start a new Excel file and copy your data again. It should be copied correctly. If still has problem try changing the delimiter to something else.

Snapshot of Actual Data

Script to reproduce this table

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2 Responses to Weird Character in Excel : Square box with Question Mark in it

  1. rishi says:
    March 25, 2014 at 5:05 am

    how to write Square box with Question Mark
    How to find & replace this character

    Reply
  2. Robin Lane says:
    March 31, 2017 at 12:52 pm

    Thanks, been looking for an answer for this for mos of the day. I did not want to upgrade. this worked great!

    Reply

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