Unfortunately you cannot resolve this one yourselves, you will need to contact the helpdesk.
The reason for the spurious error message:
The problem arises from non-printable characters. These are characters that cannot be displayed (often they are essentially formatting marks – a character to tell your browser how to display the next character – or they just don’t exist in different character sets). Sometimes a browser struggles to understand their intention because different operating systems and different software packages may read them differently/not know of them (e.g. Windows v Linux), hence why the character appears blank in the error message, but will sometimes appear when you copy/paste it into something else (like Word).
We are looking at ways to make the error more useful but unfortunately there is no easy fix and not really anything you can suggest to your bidders to limit it happening – they aren’t doing anything wrong, and it’s just down to the software they’re using, using a different character set to AWARD®.
AWARD® validates the characters carefully to ensure that everything will both display correctly, and output into Word & Excel properly, that’s why it has to be a bit sensitive about the characters.