True.

I was confused by the OP's "techincally (sic) formatted as text". On
rereading it's clear that the result should be numeric.

In article . com,
"Harlan Grove" wrote:

The TRIM is unnecessary if the ultimate goal is numeric conversion.
Excel will ignore any number of leading and/or trailing ASCII spaces
[CHAR(32)] when such strings are used as arithmetic operands. E.g.,
=(REPT(" ",32)&"123"&REPT(" ",20))+1