By: Nujat Tasnim

In reply to Leslie.

Hi LESLIE,
Thank you for sharing your valuable feedback. We appreciate it very much. I understand your confusion. It is possible that a cell appears to be empty but the ISBLANK function returns FALSE for one of these 3 reasons:
● A regular space is present in the cell.
● A non-breaking space is present in the cell.
● It contains a zero-length string.

A zero-length string, also known as an empty string, is a string with zero characters; as a result, when a cell contains a zero-length string, the LEN function returns 0. In Excel, both blank and empty cells appear empty; however, blank cells include a formula or value that evaluates to or represents a zero-length string, but empty cells do not.

In this image, you can see that cell C7 appears blank, but it’s not! It contains a zero-length string created by entering a single apostrophe (‘) and formatted like other values: General.

You can find out the Excel cells which contain zero-length strings by applying the following formula:
● Insert the following formula in cell D5 and press Enter.
● Now AutoFill the rest of the column’s cells to apply the same formula.

=IF(AND(LEN(C5)=0,NOT(ISBLANK(C5))),"Zero-length string","Not a zero-length string")

After that, you can remove the zero-length strings manually. Just select the cells and press the Delete key. Then sort to get the desired output.
Hopefully, you will be able to solve your problem now. Please feel free to reach out to us with any other questions or you can send us your Excel files as well.

Regards,
Nujat Tasnim
Exceldemy.