Problem concerning cell formats
Posted by Charlene on October 19, 2001 11:19 AM
I have roughly 5000 cells that I need excel to recognize the text as percentages for. I select them all, right click --> format cells, and change the number format to percentage. I click OK, and nothing happens. However, when I 'look' at a cell, and move to another one, it only then converts it to a percentage. Double-clicking on 5000 cells doesn't seem practical; is there a faster way to get excel to automatically recognize them as percentages?
Posted by Mark W. on October 19, 2001 11:26 AM
Your numbers are really text values. Percentage format-
ting doesn't affect text values. When you double click
on a value you activate the formula bar which translates
the text representation of a number into a true
number (e.g., ".5" into 0.5). You could select
all of these values and use the Data | Text to Columns...
menu command. Just press the [ Finish ] button
at Step 1 of 1.
