Nonbreaking spaces are the devil.

Nonbreaking spaces are the devil.

My job requires the use of excel, and I'd never used it before starting my position. As such, I'm entirely self taught, but only tend to learn the things I absolutely need in the moment to do my job. I decided to make the sheets more efficient and learned things like vlookup (and even got help from Reddit - bless them for helping me get the formula working right!) so that I could automate part of the sheets, effectively comparing two reports and returning a value if two names matched.

Except the names didn't match, even though they very clearly DID to my eyes.

Then I learned about the insidious and terrible creature known as the nonbreaking space. It looks like a regular space, but for some godforsaken reason it is not. One of the reports uses regular spaces. The other exports with nonbreaking spaces. Fine. No problem. Create vlookup function, and then create macro (also something I'd never done before) to remove all nonbreaking spaces so that the names do match.

Success!

Explain what I did to my supervisor, proud of learning of the existence of these wicked little secret nonbreaking spaces. Show my work, how it runs, look to supervisor to approval. Supervisor is all furrow-browed and says "You know there's an easier way, right?"

She points to the name cell It contains not only the name, but the employee ID on the end of it. She then shows me how to pull the employee ID out into a separate column. Then vlookup can just compare that instead of being all stroppy about different kinds of spaces.

Takes, like, 15 seconds. No macro needed. No need to worry about interdimensional demons posing as spaces.

I look very tired. My supervisor looks long-suffering. She knows that I'm learning excel on the fly, she's okay with that, but she also doesn't have the time to sit me down and explain in detail how the program works. I'm on my own to learn, and everyone is cool with that. Except the ways I learn things sometimes turn out to be convoluted and less efficient than I'm aiming for.

But I guess I learned more than one new thing, right?

Edit: Just catching up on all the comments and kind words. Thank you, everyone, for your affirmations. You're right. I learned and grew and can continue to do so. For those who offered tutorials and excel help, I greatly appreciate it. When questions arise, I know where to turn now. :)