Joining data does not work unless I retype the data in Excel

[NikAnderson2]

I am joining data from a .txt file to a county shapefile. When I validate the join, it shows no matches. I found that if I retype a County Name in Excel that it will join that one record. So to fix my issue, I have been retyping every single county name and then joining that new txt file in ArcMap. This is fine for right now, but I would like to know how to quickly resolve this issue in ArcMap or Excel so I can stop manually typing the county names again. I have tried Copy and Pasting and many other ways to quickly duplicate the whole Field. Any Ideas?

[TedKowal]

We don't have much to work on with your description?  There could be a lot of reasons why joins are not matching...Data Types, Punctuation, Null values, Case Sensitivity...  Typically I do not even attempt to join from a text file because of its many nuances. 

Give this try:

Import your text file into MS Access Database as a table.  After which make sure you County field is the same Data Type as the field you are trying to join to.  Bring in this table into Arc Map then try your join again.

Possibly when going through this exercise you may discover what is preventing the join.

PS.... Realized that you are joining to a shape file... make sure your field names are less than 8 characters....

[DanPatterson_Retired]

Bring the excel file into a geodatabase using the Excel to Table tool., then confirm field contents between the two files.   If you have to convert case or standardize case, in either or both tables, you will have to add new fields and correct the situation.  Also check for errors arising extra spaces at the end/beginning of your text entries (fix with strip() in the field calculator)