Help please, cell formatting only works after I double click the cell

[Mycotopian]

I have a worksheet with about 28000 records that I pulled from M
Access. The phone number column is left justified and has a littl
green arrow indicating there is an error of some type. The erro
balloon says " the number in this cell is formatted as text or i
preceeded by an apostophe". I try to set the formatting a
Special-Phone Number but nothing happens. However if I double click o
the cell and then click an ajoining cell the formatting works. How ca
I fix the entire column without having to double click on 28000 cells

 

[Guest]

Format as phone number, use Data>Text to Column to convert from Text to a
Number.