
The workbook is an excel file containing many worksheets. These three worksheets are named Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3. By default, a new workbook contains three worksheets, but you can change the number of worksheets that you want a new workbook to contain. By default, in Excel 2016 any new workbook you create in Excel will contain one worksheet, called Sheet1. By default, a new workbook in Excel 2013 contains three worksheets, but we can change the number of worksheets that we want a new workbook to contain. You edit the cell with bad data only one character at a time if you want to change the data but retain the formating. If you modified the cell data with hidden character and press enter, it will clear the bad character. Copying the column data to notepad or notepad++ and back doesn't remove the hidden characters, they do get copied. But if the above doesn't work, create a new column adjacent to the data, enter first two entries manually and use flash fill and it copies all the rows and removes the hidden characters.
If you select all cells and select Normal cell type, that should do as well.Select the cells and clear formating (Home tab > Editing > Clear -> 'Clear Formats'). We need to clear the hidden character which could have come as result of formatting.
So if you see left aligned numbers, that's a flag, excel thinks it's text. This can be noted as the cell values are left aligned as in text, excel automatically right align numbers. The problem was hidden characters in the data due to which excel sees the value as text. Excel automatically knows if the data is numeric. Even though it's all numbers, the Quick Analysis Tool I get is the same as if the cells were text fields (no math functions).Īnd this issue was not that the cell should have be numeric type, this operation works on general cell format. I got in this weird situation when I copied data from a table in PowerPoint.