Formulas and excel treating data as text

[slandau]

what i mean by that is i'm not really sure how to ask it.

someone is doing calculations in excel and to do them it is extracting data from different columns of an excel spreadsheet. he has set up an "if..then" statement because when one of the numbers in a certain category is zero, he wants to do something specific with it. there has been some errors while calculating because excel puts text or "non-numeric" characters in that field when it should be putting zeros.

here is a quote from another site that I think could explain this situation a little bit better...

"Sometimes the big challenge is how to get the data into Excel in the first place. In other cases the data will appear to import into Excel in good order, but formulas will produce unexpected results, where they appear to be ignoring all or part of the data. This sort of thing is usually caused by either numbers stored as text or the presence of unexpected non-printing characters."

does anyone know a way to fix this?

by the way...going through every single field and changing it to a number by hand is kind of out of the question because there is waaaaay too much data for that.

thanks a lot

[NBVC]

if you select the column with the "numbers as text", then go to Data|Text to Columns and click Finish... this should convert the column to General (numbers)...

Repeat for each column to convert.

[slandau]

Thanks. I'll give this a try the next time I'm in.

I'll let you know if it works.

Appreciate the help.