Copy and paste

[darrent]

Hi I wonder if you can help me
Im dealing with numbers constantly performing finance reconciliations.
I access customer figures via client access and then copy data required
and paste into excel.
Now Negatives will show as 100000- in client access and when i was on
excel windows 2000 the 100000- used to convert automatically to -100000
(when doing paste ) meaning its seen as a number
Ive now been put onto excel 2003 SP1 and the paste does not convert
100000- to -100000 meaning its now text and wont add up, causing me
untold grief

Our internal systems people asvise its not their job to assist in this
matter ( thanks! having demanded i upgrade )

Now i have 100's of records like this and cant edit and move the - from
the end to the start.
This used to be a 1 second process ( copy and paste )
Does anyone know if this is bug in excel or CA or is there a setting or
can anyone provide a solution that can convert -(minus)at end of number
to -(minus)at start of number

 

[Guest]

Darrent,

This situation is encountered in many companies I guess, people demanding
things but not wanting to be bothered with the annoying consequences.
Maybe you can do a paste special? being absolutely sure that the format of
the cells you are pasting into has the correct format (number)????

 

[Guest]

Just another thought....
lets say cell A1 contains the value 1000-
you could use the following formula to convert it to -1000
=IF(RIGHT(A1,1)="-",-1*LEFT(A1,LEN(A1-1)),A1)

it checks whether the last character of the tekst is a -
if so the number prior to the - is multiplied by -1
if there is no - at the end it is assumed the number is usable as-is

Although I do not think it is efficient...It should do the trick...