U.S Patent 7,475,086 granted to IBM: Method of automatically removing leading and trailing space characters from data being entered into a database system.

A computer Implemented method of automatically removing space characters from data being entered into a database system are provided. When a user creates a table in a database system into which data having leading and/or trailing character spaces may be entered, the user may specifically instruct the database system to remove any character spaces before entering the data into the table.

Consequently, when a piece of data is being entered into the table, the database system will determine whether the piece of data includes leading and/or trailing character spaces. If so, the database system will automatically remove the character spaces from the piece of data before it is entered into the table. Hence, the use of TRIM functions when retrieving data from the database system will be obviated.

It took three people from Texas to come up with that idea, and they thought it was so brilliant that it deserved to be patented.

Does this mean that the following VBA procedure violates the patent?

Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range)
Dim cell As Range
On Error Resume Next
For Each cell In Target
If Not cell.HasFormula Then cell = Trim(Target)
Next cell
End Sub