Faster At Excel

3 Ways To Convert Text To Numbers In Excel

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3 Ways To Convert Text To Numbers In Excel

Sometimes you get data and something doesn’t look right. See below. The data in the left column is formatted as text. Therefore, it is useless in calculations (you can see that, when I summed the column, the result was zero).

What you will often want instead is for these “numbers” to be truly formatted as numbers — so that you can use them in formulas.

Below, I have converted the text in the left column to actual numbers in the right column. You can see that the SUM function now works.

excel-text-vs-number-formatting

How Do I Know The Data Is Formatted As Text?

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5 Quick Data Set Up Excel Shortcuts

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Excel Shortcuts For Data Set Up

Watch the 15-second video below to see if you can figure out the 5 shortcuts I used to set up the data for easier use  This is something you can do easily in 15 seconds any time you get a new data file that begins in A1 with a header row in row 1.  (Alternatively, you can also create a Table with Ctrl+T — which will do much of the same, but much more — and maybe some features and formatting you don’t want).

See if you can do it in under 15 seconds.

Scroll down for my solution.

Here are the tasks (starting point is cell D8):

  1. bold top row
  2. freeze top row
  3. add filters

CLICK ON THE GRAPHIC TO BEGIN THE 15-SECOND VIDEO CLIP

excel-shortcuts-data-set-up-gif

 

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