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1. Select the range A1:A4 and change the number format to General.
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2. Numbers preceded by an apostrophe are also treated as text. Select cell A5 and manually remove the apostrophe.
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3a. You can also combine step 1 and 2 by adding an empty cell to the range A1:A5. By doing this, you let Excel know that these text strings are numbers. Copy an empty cell.
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3b. Select the range A1:A5, right click, and then click Paste Special...
3c. Click Add.
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3d. Click OK.
Result. All numbers are right-aligned and treated as numbers.
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4a. You can also use the VALUE function.
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4b. Here's another example. Use the Right function (or any other text function) to extract characters from a text string and then use the VALUE function to convert these characters to a number.
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