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Characters to use / avoid
- Avoid accidentally adding in special and hidden characters from copy/paste
- Line breaks and paragraph markers may not be readily obvious
- Symbols may not display properly in some software/systems
- Avoid undesirable extra spaces in cells -- there are excel functions that can help remove them
- Represent zeroes and null values unambiguously
- Fill in a measurement/count of zero explicitly - do not leave blank
- To indicate a missing value...
- Leave the cell blank, or
- Choose a text indicator like "NA" or "-" and use it consistently throughout your documents