Filtering table in excel brings up cells I am not filtering for

Question

I have a shared online excel tracking spreadsheet that has a big table with filters. When I filter one of the columns for blanks, it brings up blanks but also cells that have data in them.

Details: There are 14 columns & I am trying to filter column 10. The column I am filtering contains dates & blanks. The data is entered by another team from their separate tracking spreadsheet.

I have tried using the desktop excel however the same thing happens. It has worked fine previously but now it is suddenly not working

Answer 1

This happens likely because Excel doesn’t always see a cell that looks blank as truly blank. Sometimes the cells contain spaces, invisible characters, or formulas that return an empty string (""). In shared workbooks, especially with online Excel or data coming from another team, this is common. Dates stored as text or with slight formatting issues can also appear blank but won’t be recognized by the filter.

To identify truly blank cells, you can create a helper column next to your data with a formula like

=IF(TRIM(J2)="","Blank","Not Blank")

assuming column 10 is column J. This removes any spaces and checks if the cell is actually empty. You can then filter using this helper column instead of relying on the built-in blank filter.

If the problem is caused by invisible spaces, select column 10, open Find & Replace, type a single space in Find, leave Replace empty, and click Replace All. For text dates, select the column, go to Data → Text to Columns → Finish without changing any settings to force Excel to interpret them as real dates.

A quick way to test if a cell is truly blank is to use

=LEN(J2)

If it returns 0, it is truly blank. If it returns 1 or more, there is something invisible in the cell.

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hth

Marcin