• The column is a varchar(1000), it's a free form user field from a 3rd party app, specifically it's for "notes". There are carriage returns in there, but I've never had issues with that. Here is the closest I can find to what I'm seeing "¬", it's not being handled by ltrims. SSRS renders it just fine in report manager, and it actually successfully exports it to Excel. The problem is when I open the excel file that it blows up and I lose all of the contents.

    I know that I can just get rid of the character in SQL, or save to a lower version of excel, but what I'm really looking for is a way to catch this type of thing ahead of time in the future. Does anyone know a way to semi-efficiently search through a note field like this for characters that aren't standard?