Click the down-arrow under the Paste tool and choose Paste Special from the resulting choices.Select the range of cells you want to convert to numbers.If you don't see the exclamation mark icon when you select the cells, then you can use a different method to do the conversion: Excel immediately changes the format on the cells (to General) and converts the text values to numbers. You want to select the Convert to Number option. (See Figure 1.)Ĭlick the icon and some options appear. You may see a small exclamation mark icon appear near the upper-left corner of the selected cells. The following three solutions, however, seem to be the easiest and quickest.įirst, select the cells that are formatted as text, but that actually contain numbers.

There are several different ways you can force the conversion of forced text into numeric values, ranging from macros to using formulas in other columns to perform the conversion. It is possible to remove the text formatting attribute from the cells you want to sum, but that won't cause Excel to reassess the contents of the cells and treat them as numbers or dates, where appropriate. The SUM function ignores any cells formatted as text. To make matters tricky, however, if you use the SUM function (which most people do when summing an entire column or row), then you won't get the proper sum. If you use a formula such as the following, then Excel has no problem:Įxcel provides the correct sum, provided at least one of the cells (A1 or A2) was not formatted as text. For instance, you may decide that you want to add up the contents of cells that are formatted as text. Of course, forcing Excel to treat your input as text can have unwanted repercussions later. When you do, the information in the cell is always treated as text. You can overcome this natural tendency of Excel by formatting a cell as text before entering information in it.

If your entry can be translated as a number or a date, then Excel treats it that way. When you enter information in a worksheet, Excel does its best to decipher what type of data you are entering.

Convert text to number excel