Odd behavior of texts from software

I realize that sometimes texts in workbooks that my colleague sent to me have odd behaviours. They probably get these texts from internal software.

For instance, B2 is a text I copy-pasted from their workbook. Its format is already Text. E2 is a text I entered, whose format is Text too. G2 checks if they are the same, and returns FALSE.

Does anyone know the cause here? How could I convert the texts from my colleague to something I could use?

Solution 1:

If I paste a number from one cell into another cell and then set the cell formatting to "text"; then use a pre-formatted-as-text cell to manually type the number; and then use your comparison, I get the same result.

There may be conversion issues you need to be aware of (might not be currency safe etc., check the documentation), but if you use =value(E2)=value(B2) it should work.

side note: I believe I see a display-font difference between the two cells in your screen shot. Not sure if this is excel or if your pasted content has XML formatting tags embedded in it. This might cause an equality operator to see them differently.