I exported a table from a website to excel. One of the columns which contained money values i.e. £30.09 was entered into excel as a text value. TYPE(cell address) returns 2. I want to SUM this column but SUM ignores text values and so SUM returns 0.00. I created a new column with =RIGHT(old column,LEN(old column)-1) which got rid of the "£" but the new column was still TYPE 2 non-numeric. Is there a way of changing cell type programatically?

try multiplying that formula by 1

programmatically.... search the VBA help file for Conversion Keyword Summary

I tried your *1 but it failed. I decided to recheck and found that my conversion formula had left a leading space in the string and that was the cause of my problem. Your *1 worked then as of course did VALUE(cell address) as will the VAL function of VBA. Apologies for wasting your time.
Also thanks for the useful lead into the VBA help topic.