NULL Join - Excel to feature class

[GeorgeNwigwe2]

I am trying to JOIN an Excel table with the Names of metropolitan areas and a feature class with the features of the metropolitan Areas. when I JOIN it my JOIN returns Null with no matching features but I see that the names in the fields are exactly the same. the fields both have special characters like dashes (-) commas (,) and spaces. this is a sample of one record that I see in both the feature class and table. "New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA".

any suggestions on how to solve this ?

[DanPatterson · Accepted solution]

First, use Excel to Table to remove excel issues and produce a file gdb table.  Try the join then.

Also, check for leading/trailing spaces in both the source and destination field column used for the join.