Forum Discussion
Excel numbers stored as text fiasco
ToasterGhost I agree, Excel has some infuriating counter productive ways it does things, my favorite is how it cant figure out that 45+23 is a formula I want to evaluate, vs forcing me to remember to type +45+23 every time. when would you ever want it to just show as text?
regards your problem, today i imported a file from Verizon for data usage and all the numbers came over as text, with that little exclamation point asking if i want to convert to numbers. fine, but not cool for all the hundreds of numbers i would have to convert. and copy/paste values doesn't do it either.
turns out that if you select all the errant numbers, then go to the first one in the selection, that exclamation point shows up, and selecting "convert to number" works on all selected at once.
seemed to work for me, maybe you have to only select bad cells?
jxwalter10Selecting multiple cells in a row helps a lot.
Ctrl-Click fails - when selecting multiple cells that are not consecutive, the exclamation goes away.
I tried "ignore", but it's temporary - after resort table, the exclamation comes back.
Also, by default, Excel tries to convert text to dates!!
It tripped on 5-77... but not the others... bizarre.
I solved the formatting problem(s)!!
Credit to Google -> https://allthings.how/how-to-convert-text-to-date-in-excel/
The sheer quantity of Googles people do every day to figure out Microsoft's nonsense must be astronomical.
Microsoft should fix the square wheels; instead it focuses on confusing grandma with w11.