That works!

I created a cell with your suggested formula pointing to one of the
errant cells, then copied it to a range of cells that would encompass
all of the cells that were not converted properly. (Fortunately, they
were contiguous; there were no cells having contents that would be
mangled by the TRIM process.) Now, the rest of my workbook can simply
point to those trimmed up cells. The data import process will have to
include a macro that automates this step.

Thanks.

Chris.

Paul Sheppard wrote:
C Glenn Wrote:

I'm working with a spreadsheet produced by a scraper. For reasons that
I can only guess and am powerless to change, it places an apostrophe
before some of the numbers (IOW, one might imagine that it believes
them
to be numeric strings).

I was hoping to find a way to remove them en masse, through search and
replace perhaps. But the search half of the process doesn't know how
to
look for an apostrophe at the beginning of a cell. It seems that
those
don't count.

Any ideas on how this could be automated?


Hi C Glenn

In an adjacent column try =TRIM(cellreference) eg =TRIM(A1), this will
remove the '

Then copy and paste special values