Use the Value(A1) worksheet function

Or in vba use Val(str)

"Philip Davich" wrote:

I have a user who is pasting (static) data from an HTML
table (on a website) into Excel. One column contains
numeric data, but it comes into Excel padded with spaces
on both ends (e.g. 100.00 shows up as " 100.00 "). Using
the LEN function, I can see that the length is 9. If I
apply a CODE function, I get a result of 160, which
suggests that the padded characters are indeed spaces;
however, neither TRIM nor CLEAN functions are able to
remove this data padding . Consequently, I cannot do
anything arithmetic with it. I assume this has something
to do with the fact the user is pasting the data from an
HTML table, but I'm at a loss on how to clean it up. Any
suggestions?