If cell contents begin with math operators, strip them

Hi,

i've got a report from a company that i download weekly and which i add to a workbook of sales. The problem is as the workbook grows, it has gotten very slow. i think i've tracked down the problem to the fact that some of the cells begin with math operators (- + =) and Excel is trying to "calculate" them. i could be wrong, another issue i have is that i am frequently stopped while excel waits for another application to complete an OLE...Anyway, i am trying to come up with a vba solution to search the worksheet for cells that either begin with "- ", "+ ", or "= " (that is: the operator followed by a space), and trim those two characters out.

i've attached a sample of one of the sheets. i believe the affected cells are all in column A if that helps to streamline things at all.

Thank you all so much!

chris

Thank you, Alan. i will try that out later.

The sheet has other sections that have different layouts (numbers might be in column 5 instead of 4, for instance), but i'm pretty sure the "problems" are limited to this upper section. Can this Get/Transform be applied to a range selection as opposed to the whole sheet?

Thanks again!

chris