imported cells contain apostrophe

[Glenn]

Hi,

I have several contacts in my Outlook Database that I exported into an Excel
Spreadsheet.

When I open the spreadsheet and click on any of the cells, there is an
apostrophe before the text. This creates a problem when I try to format the
cells - for instance if the cell contains a date and I want to apply one of
the date display types to it, I can't (unless I remove the apostrophe).

I've tried doing a search and replace, but it doesn't find any apostrophes.

Is there some easy fix to this? (I've already modified the data that I
needed to, so I would prefer not to have to reimport anything.)

Thanks.

 

[Debra Dalgleish]

There are instructions here for manually or programmatically converting
text to numbers:

http://www.contextures.com/xlDataEntry03.html