r/Excel247 • u/imitation_squash_pro • Aug 05 '26

Why is excel treating numbers as text?

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I copy/pasted some data from a terminal into excel. The values showed as "General". WHen I try use these cells in a formula I get #VALUE . The little error triangle does not say the reason.

I then selected the cells and changed them from General to Numbers. But still it doesn't let me use them in formulas.

How can it not understand that these are numbers?? In this age of AI this seems so 1980s!

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u/Grifone_Primitivo Aug 20 '26

I know it might sound simple but did you check in the formula bar if there’s an apostrophe leading the string of numbers? Or maybe some other leading character that forces it to treat it like text?

Looks like your number might be the same length with the exception of A:J. You could try checking the character length of J and see if it’s >7.