ms excel find and replace @ symbol results in broken formula

Posted by Loopo on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Loopo
Published on 2013-11-01T16:42:45Z Indexed on 2013/11/03 10:01 UTC
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microsoft-excel

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find-and-replace

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function

I'm trying to search and replace in excel, the column is formatted as 'Text'.

Find: [@

replace with: @

Whenever this finds a match at the start of a cell i.e the cell contents start with [@ and tries to replace that with @ the result is an error 'This function is not valid'

I guess that since the @ operator is for references, this is causing the cell to be interpreted differently (not as text anymore)

How do I make this replacement work?

Copy/paste into another program is not a good option because some of the cells contain line-breaks.

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