Decimal Point where it belongs AND Decimal Point where comma belongs #VALUE

the numbers may in fact be text. You can convert each number using a helper column and multiply each by 1.

Simply multiplying by 1 (or any of the other common "convert number stored as text to number") may not work, or may not work consistently. With multiple "dots" within a number Excel may not know how to interpret these strings as numbers, or may be inconsistent in its interpretation of these as numbers.

Can I assume that the interpretation of these as numbers is straightforward to you? Can you provide some examples of these text strings that illustrate the different values, along with the numeric value you need them converted to?

My first thought is to use the Text to Columns command with "." as delimiter to separate the different parts of the number into separate columns. Then use formulas to recombine them correctly.

Another possibility is to use the SUBSTITUTE() function (https://support.office.com/en-us/art...0-1e58df3bc332 ). Spend some time with the 4th "Instance num" argument, so that you can specify which "."'s to replace with nothing or "," so that Excel can interpret these as numbers.

Here is some of the cell content:
8696.957.41 8057.500.46 7823.859.57 7823.859.6
203.178.41 145.383.05 21.505.29
204 201 200.00
4 2 3.00
0.75

I think it's OK to assume if there is a decimal point near the right end that is followed by one or two digits then that's a "real" decimal point.
But the others that fall 6 places to the left (sometimes 5 places to the left) are supposed to be commas - 1,000s separators.

Adding zero or multiplying by 1, or adding two of these numbers or ..... results consistently in #VALUE.