Rumy said:
I have a column of data with invereted commas.
ex- "123456". I need to remove these inverted
commas and make the number 123456.
By "inverted commas", are you referring to the (double) quotes?
I think you are asking: how do you change a column of numeric strings
entered as text into bona fide numbers.
In Excel 2003, perhaps the simplest way is: select the column or the range
of cells, then click on Data > Text to Columns.
Caveat.... If some of those numeric strings have leading zeros, you will
"lose" the leading zeros when you convert to a number. You can "restore"
them by using a custom format; for example, 0000 for a 4-digit number.
But in that case, the question is: why are you converting to number in the
first place? Numeric strings with leading zeros usually represent
identification codes. They should be treated as text, not numbers. Only
convert numeric strings to number if you need to perform arithmetic
operations on them.
