You have found a very pesky fact. Apostrophes in the middle of text are easy
to remove, but leading apostrophes are more difficult.

Enter this tiny macro:

Sub tickout()
Dim r As Range
For Each r In Selection
r.Value = r.Value
Next
End Sub

Select the cells you want leading ticks (apostrophes) removed and call the
macro.
It will remove ticks but is not effective against fleas
--
Gary''s Student


"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?