Convert numbers stored as text
That little green triangle in the corner of the cell means your number is text. Upload the file and download it with real numbers.
Why it happens
Excel stores as text any value it does not recognise as a number, and the most frequent causes are:
- The file came from an export that added thousands separators.
- It was pasted from a web page and dragged along a space or a currency symbol.
- The CSV used decimal commas and was opened with decimal-point settings.
The symptom: the column aligns left, SUM returns 0, and the pivot table only offers "count" instead of "sum".
What this tool recognises
- Thousands and decimal separators, in either order.
1.234,56and1,234.56both give 1234.56. - Currency symbols and spaces:
$ 1,234becomes 1234. - Accounting parentheses:
(1,234)means −1234 in accounting, and is converted as such. - Percentages, which you can convert to a fraction (15 % → 0.15) or leave as a number.
Anything it does not recognise is left exactly as it was. Emptying a cell you do not understand would be destroying data.
The dot-versus-comma ambiguity
1,234 means one thousand two hundred thirty-four in English and one point two
three four in Spanish. When the string is genuinely ambiguous, the tool uses your
language's convention. If both separators appear, the last one is always the
decimal.
Frequently asked questions
Is any data lost?
No. Anything that cannot be read as a number is kept as it is.
Can I apply it only to the amounts column?
Yes, name it under "columns to convert". Empty scans the whole sheet.
What about codes with leading zeros?
They are respected. A value like 007 is left as text, because converting it
would lose the zeros and with them the meaning of the code.
Does it work with CSV?
Yes. And the result comes out with numbers in a neutral format, which is what databases understand.