Numbers, text and dates

You need to add up a week of sales for five managers. In your head it comes to $6,500, but Excel confidently shows 5,000. See for yourself:

Excel didn't get the addition wrong: it doesn't treat one of the cells as a number at all. To find that cell, you need to know how Excel tells numbers from text.

Number or text

Excel decides by itself what's in a cell: a number, text or a date. It decides based on what you typed. Excel can only add numbers, and it skips text.

You can see the kind of data right away: Excel aligns numbers and dates to the right edge of the cell, and text to the left. Guess how Excel will read each value, and see which side it lines up on.

Excel recognizes a number when:

• the cell has only digits, no letters;
• the decimal part is separated by a period: 3.5;
• the thousands are separated by commas: 1,500;
• there's a percent sign at the end: 15%.

Excel recognizes a date if you type the month, day and year separated by slashes: 2/1/2026. Inside, Excel stores a date as a number, so you can calculate with dates: for example, find out how many days passed between two of them.

Number stored as text

The most common problem in tables: a cell looks like a number, but Excel stores it as text. This happens when data is copied from another program or when there's an apostrophe before the number: '1500. The apostrophe itself isn't visible in the cell.

Two signs give a cell like that away:

• the number is aligned to the left edge, like text;
• there's a green triangle in the top left corner of the cell.

To turn it into a number, click the cell, click the exclamation mark icon next to it and choose Convert to Number. You can also just type the number again, without the apostrophe. If there are many cells like that, select them all at once and choose Convert to Number just once.

Cell B3 with Ben's sales has both signs. Fix it: