How to Convert Text to Numbers in Excel with VALUE

Numbers stored as text break SUM and lookups. Use VALUE to convert prices, quantities and numbers buried inside text.

You will learn to

• Convert a text price to a real number with VALUE
• Do math with converted values
• Extract digits from text, then convert them

How it works

When data comes from a web portal or CSV, numbers often arrive as text — left-aligned, with a green triangle, and ignored by SUM. =VALUE(B2) converts text that looks like a number ("12.40", "$12.40", "1,200", "45%") into a real number you can calculate with.

VALUE needs the whole string to be numeric, so text like "100 per box" returns #VALUE!. Extract the digits first and convert them: =VALUE(LEFT(D2,FIND(" ",D2)-1)). Functions like LEFT, MID and TEXTBEFORE always return text, so wrapping them in VALUE is a habit worth building.

=VALUE(B2)