Figures locked in text format

[Marcia]

I imported data from a web page and used the feature that allows me to post
the info to Excel with the destination formatting of the file I am posting it
to. However, when I try to manipulate the data, as I have done in the past
with other data, it will not let me reformat the text to number- no matter
what I do to it. I've tried everything! I want to be able to sum the column,
etc.

 

[Fred Smith]

Give us an example of the data you are working with. And what have you tried
to "do to it"?

Regards,
Fred

 

[Marcia]

Fred, thanks for helping me out here.

An example is a website that maintains our credit card purchases. I can
print from there a report that shows all payments and who paid, but it is in
web-format. I hit control A to highlight all, then control copy to copy and
then paste into excel. I then choose "destination formatting" for the format
I would like to have the data in on my Excel spreadsheet. In the past, I
have done this with other data from the web and have been able to reformat
from text to number and work with the data. For some reason, this time, I
cannot.

Thanks, Marcia

 

[Marcia]

Fred,
After messing around with the numbers a little bit more- I found that there
are two trailing spaces after the numbers. I looked on line for how to
remove them and I saw that there is a trim function to remove them. This did
not work. I also tried find and replace (find space space and replace with
blank). This did not work either. Any other ideas? For now I am hitting F2
and then deleting the spaces manually. It is too tedious for the amount of
data I have, so let me know if you've got any idea what I can do.

Thanks a lot.

-Marcia

 

[Marcia]

Fred,
Just after my last message- I poked around on-line one more time and found
on a PC magazine discussion group someone that had the same exact problem as
me and it turned out that the solution was to use find and replace, but in
find I had to copy the spaces from behind my numbers and paste those into
find box and replace with blank. It worked. I'm good to go. Thanks again.

-Marcia

 

[Fred Smith]

This is common in data download from the internet. It's typically
non-breaking spaces (Alt-160) which are causing the problem. Unfortunately,
neither Trim nor Clean removes these characters. Your solution is as good as
any.

Regards,
Fred