Marsha wrote:
I discovered that, although I had selected cells and formatted them as Number, Excel still had them as General so they were not being counted in the SUM formula. There was a tiny yellow diamond with ! inside next to each one. When I hovered over
the diamond and clicked, I was given a menu from which I chose "convert to a number". Problem solved.
The problem was not the cell format; any numeric cell format will do, including General.
The problem was: the cell value was text, not numeric. That is the
type of the value, not the cell format.
How that happened is anyone's guess. You offer no clues. Most commonly, it was the result of copy-and-paste. Sometimes it is the result of importing from another application.
We can enter text into any cell, regardless of the cell format. In particular, the cell format does not have to be General or Text.
PS.... Simply changing the cell format is not sufficient to convert the cell value from text to numeric. We must also "re-enter" the cell value. That can be done after changing the cell format by selecting each cell and pressing F2, then Enter. But of course, that is tedious if you have a lot of cells to convert. There are alternatives, like the one you discovered. But they all run the risk of changing the cell value infinitesimally in some situations.
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