[Qgis-user] Unsuccessful table join

[Barry Martin]

I have a dual-boot 64-bit desktop PC with Linux Ubuntu 15.04 and Windows 
8.1. I have installed QGIS Desktop 2.8 on Ubuntu. My first experience 
with QGIS was last year, when I successfully created a map from NZ 
census data. I had no further use for QGIS until now. I have had to 
reinstall QGIS, as a recent upgrade to Ubuntu 15.04 had apparently 
deleted it. I am trying to create a map by again joining census data in 
a spreadsheet file (extension .ods) to my shapefile. The layer values do 
not show up in the shapefile's attribute table after joining - the 
fields are there, but with null values. I have made sure that the join 
field and target field are the same type (string) Can someone tell me 
what I am doing wrong?

Barry.