An excel problem driving me crazy. (Some might say less of a drive, and more of a putt.) I've managed to recreate it in a 4 cell Excel spread sheet, but still can't figure out what is going. I have a text representation of a number which the VALUE function wont translate. To the right of it I typed the number as text, rather than pasting from the internet site with the data. It look identical. VALUE works fine. As I said, recreated the error in 4 cells. I would be very grateful for anyone who felt like letting me email them a copy of this tiny spreadsheet and look it over to tell me what is going on. If you feel like it, let me know what email to send it to.

One hint is that I used the single quote when I typed it, and that single quote is NOT in the cell I pasted. But not a number, cause you cannot do numeric things to it.

Excel 2007, but same problem in 2003 and in Open office.

Thanks

I don't have excel at home, but I can look at it at the office tomorrow, TB. TamaraS AT meyer DOT com

When you paste into the cell, you can paste-special as text, sidestep the issue.

Thanks Tamara insent to you. When I pull up paste special

In nome of my versions does paste special and the equivalent of text only solve the problem. However, if I go back to the source page and paste as text only in 2007 rather than 2003 from the source page, it pastes directly as numbers. But I still cannot figure out what is in the sheet I sent you. Seems to be neither text nor numbers.

Got it. Huh, that's pretty weird. I have to do my job for a while, but I will poke at it some more when I have a chance.

I'm trying to install bootcamp/Win7-32bit on a work Mac Tower (cheese grater style). It's OS is capped at 10.7.5. It looks like Win7 will work. It wouldn't do the 64-bit version. Here is the problem.

I've got it almost all installed. It looks to need one final reboot, and then does some Windows magic after booting. However, the damn thing won't launch Windows. You get the pretty logo. Then it reboots, with a screen saying might be damaged. Either boot into safe mode, or boot with the installer disc, and click repair. So I try to boot into safe mode, and then it pops up with a "the last bit that needs installing can't install in safe mode, reboot". When I boot from installer disc, and try to repair, it says nothing is wrong.

Anyone have a clue what might be the problem?

I went through a similar issue a few years ago on my older Mac Pro towers and I don't think I ever did figure it out.

Typo, one quick thought on your problem. Have you checked the category (general,text, etc.) of the cells are formated in, both for the pasted cell and for the cell with the value function in it? Perhaps the formatting is such that the data isn't in the form excel is expecting?

If you want to send me your test sheet to look at, my profile addy is good.

I finally figured out using the LEN function. There is a trailing non-printable character that is not visible that carried over from the web page. If I use the following: =VALUE(LEFT(A1,LEN(A1)-1)) I get the cell. Unfortunately, CLEAN does not work for this. Don't know how to generalize beyond this to remove all non-numeric characters regardless of where they are in the string - but I'm sure there are ways to do this using various find functions. At any rate, that works for this data set where I can hard code that I only need to remove on character from the far right.

(According to the Excel CODE function, it is character(160), the non-breaking space, so I could also hard code that with SUBSTITUTE, which would be position independent. Generalizing it to all non-numeric characters would be a bit tougher, but I'm sure there is a way.)

Thanks -t for taking the time, and DX for your offer.

Glad you figured it out. Sorry I wasn't much help!