Yesterday I was searching for a tool to display special characters in Excel, to remove them from a workbook. And I found to great Excel add-in called Cell View available here. Once installed, the add-in add a new Menu option under the view menu: View cell content. You just have to select a cell and activate this menu option. Cell View displays the characters in the cell and their codes and highlight any special character. The problem with special characters in Excel is that they are displayed as blank character. So Cell View is really useful to identify and get rid of them.