Forum Discussion
Impossible to sum numbers in Excel
Thanks. The values in column D are text values although they look like currency amounts.
Select the values.
Press Ctrl+H to activate the Replace dialog.
Enter € in the 'Find what' box and leave the 'Replace with' box empty.
Click 'Replace All'.
Next, clear the 'Find what' box and paste ‑ into it (warning: this is not the standard minus sign, it is a non-breaking hyphen!)
Enter a standard - in the 'Replace with' box.
Click 'Replace All'.
The numbers should now sum correctly.
HansVogelaar Thank you for your reply.
I've tried that but I am messing up somehwere, I think.
I am unsure how to do one step in your instructions:
Next, clear the 'Find what' box and paste ‑ into it (warning: this is not the standard minus sign, it is a non-breaking hyphen!)
Can you tell me how to do that?
(I've tried pasting a non-breaking hyphen symbol into a blank cell and then copy / pasting that into the 'find what' box and continued to the last step in your instructions (replace with a standard minus in the 'replace with' box but that doesn't seem to work for me).
davidmgahan , thank you for information on how to get around this nonsense. It would be nice if MS could make Excel add text fields that are numbers, it would exclude commas, pounds, lira, dollars, maybe get rid of all non numeric characters (except the period) and just add them together. It shouldn't be that difficult. I'm sure we're not the only ones this has tripped up and wasted countless hours. Again thank you for your help.
- SUCCESS!!!!
Thank you for your help and thank you to everyone who replied.
Now to make some notes for the future!! 🙂 You can select and copy the minus sign in one of the cells, then paste it into the Replace dialog.
