Help Re-formatting Cells (not as easy as it sounds)

  • Thread starter Thread starter shadestreet
  • Start date Start date
S

shadestreet

I have a column of values that are all numbers, however, Excel doesn'
recognize them as numbers. (These were dumped into Excel by some othe
program).

I need to scan through these columns with VLOOKUP to match, but sinc
they are treated as text (it appears) I am getting "#N/A" for th
entries.

Now, all of these data entries appear to be regular numbers, but whe
you click on the cell you see an apostrophe in front of each number.
Examples

looks like: 112358 but the cell has '112358 as the input.

When I try to change format, nothing happens (i.e. currency doesnt ad
dollar signs, cant add decimals, etc). Therefore, I assume these ar
treated as text.

The data set I am using as the Lookup for these values are correc
though, in otherwords the entry for 112358 is a number, so when exce
looks "112358" it doesn't recognize '112358 and returns #n/a.

Is there any way to quickly convert these numbers so I can perform m
vlookups?

Thank
 
Hi
try the following
- change the format of your imported cell range to 'General'
- select an empty cell and cop it
- select your imported data
- goto 'Edit - Paste Special' and choose the action 'add'
 
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