What do these numbers look like? Is there a single apostrophe at the
beginning of them (i.e. a ' )?

Please provide an example of your data.

Have you tried formatting the cells as "Number"? Are they currently
formatted as "Text" or "General"?

Eric

"a m spock" wrote:

i have received a spreadsheet in which some numbers appear to be entered as
text. i have tried the =value(text) function but am not able to convert them
back to numbers. please help.