Try this in Excel to for a possible fix:
Copy a blank cell.
Select your numbers and choose Edit | Paste Special | Add.

tj

"noyb" wrote:

I have a program which creates an Excel file but places a " ' " at the
beginning of every cell, numbers included, for example { '18.75000 }.
Reformatting the cells does not make the text a numeric. I can edit out
the ' manually but using Find And Replace produces error message that
data cannot be found. What am I missing?
Thanks