Numbers that are stored as text can cause unexpected results, especially when you use these cells in Excel functions such as SUM and AVERAGE because these functions ignore cells that have text ...

Microsoft Excel depends on data that’s stored correctly. If you receive text values that should be real numbers, use one of these methods to get you back to the real work.

Excel might not allow you to convert numbers stored as text to numbers if the cells are formatted as ‘Text’ or if they contain invisible characters like non-breaking spaces or special symbols.