Why are my numbers left justified?

[jasonkgreen]

I grabbed a table from a Wikipedia page. Some of the numbers had asterisks at the end (see Passing Yards 1 image below). I did a Find - Replace All (finding ~* and replacing with nothing). This resulted in the numbers with asterisks being right-justified and the others staying as left-justified. I highlighted the column and changed the formatting from General to Number, but the left-justified format remains.

If I highlight one of the left-justified cells, hit F2 and then hit Enter, it becomes right-justified. What's the issue here and how do I fix it?

 

[SunnyAlv]

I thought it was just a matter of formatting letters and numbers, so some cells were formatted "General" and some cells were formatted "Number" or "Comma Style",
so I think you can change the format of column "C" there to "General", I often get problems like that, and I often do this

 

[Peter_SSs]

The issue is that you have 'numbers stored as text'. Changing the cell formatting does not change the underlying value so the 'numbers' remain as text.
Try this instead, right from the beginning when some of the values have the asterisk.

1. Select the column of data
2. Data ribbon tab -> Text to Columns
3. Delimited -> Next -> Remove any ticks from Tab/Semicolon/Comma/Space -> Add tick to Other and insert an asterisk in box to the right -> Next -> Click in the second column in the bottom section (it will be blank & turn black when you click in it) -> Mark 'Do not import column (skip) in the top section -> Finish