Hello, We have a system that builds reports and allows the user to download
them as excel files amongst other formats.

Today I opened up the report to be greeted by a lot of the numbers set as
text format (bringing up the error flag). Attempting to do =SUM(504:550) just
returns a zero.

Right clicking the cells and then going to format cells and attempting to
set them to general or number doesn't work. If I hold the cursor over the
error symbol and then click "convert to number", this works.

I'm just wondering what's going on? I'll tell them to do the "convert to
number" thing to enable them to do things with the numbers, but some arn't
computer literate at all, thus want to steer away from lots of instructions
to throw at them.

Thank you for any help offered.