Excel 2010 Find NOT Working

[Pstloui]

Default Find Function Not Working - Solution
Issue where Excel find function stopped working correctly.

All, I have searched MSOfficeForums as well as other sites for a solution to this issue. When I noticed the sporadic problem occur, the only solution was to save, exit, re-open. Then, Find would work for a short while, then stop. Yes, I tried all of the suggestions, such as look in values, match case, match entire cell contents, but no luck.

Finally, I dropped the entire spreadsheet into Notepad and pasted back into Excel. Now Find works properly. The data was generated from a mainframe ASCII text file (yes ASCII, through SAS), then imported into Excel. This may be part of the problem, I don't know. Anyway, this seems to be the ONLY solution.

Also, quick note. I had used cell colors to visually delineate certain column groups. After pasting back in from Notepad, most of the cells lost coloring but some of the colored cells remained. I suspect issue may have to do will cell colors? Sounds odd, I know, but I suspect this may be part of the issue

[Pecoflyer]

Probably presence of non printable characters like CHR(160) or CHR(10)
Please post a sample sheet ( no pics please)

[Pstloui]

Hi Pecoflyer, I had to strip out most of the data to be in compliance with the file upload size limitation, but I think there is enough left for you to see what's going on. The next to the last row is where control-find would not locate the second occurrence of 'DWANA GRACE-PRUITT'. I have also deleted quite a bit of info to make this as generic as possible.

What we have here is a GIGO situation where the system has no established data entry integrity constraints. Approximately 60,000 records wherein it is my task to identify duplicate businesses and names. Stripping out all special characters, I created a compkey that pretty much did that for business name, however, I did not have that luxury for contacts. You will see names entered in no particular order, including/excluding periods, commas, initials, prefix, suffix, etc. (a true mess). I used color coding to help me identify where I was as I worked my way through.

I didn't see any imbedded special characters when reviewing in Notepad, but I am not perfect and it is possible there are some. This anomally had/has me frustrated, as the control-find problem is happening again, and I am truly puzzled. Any thoughts? Help!