Copying and pasting acount data into Excel as text will not reformat to a number or currency

[ncbergst]

From the Vanguard account website, the download function for the cost basis screen is not available. Copying and pasting the data as text goes into Excel pastes okay into separate columns that match the website, but I cannot get the value cells to reformat as currency or numbers that can be used for analysis. The buttons are all available and no error messages come up when attempting to reformat, but the cells apparently stay as text that cannot be summed, averaged, etc. Is there something that needs to be done first that I'm missing? Thanks!

[Pecoflyer]

Perhaps format cells as " General" before pasting ?

[ncbergst]

Hello Pecoflyer,

Thank you very much for your suggestion, but I'm not sure what you mean. The Excel spreadsheet is already formatted general and when I copy the numbers in as text, Excel allows me to reformat the cells to numbers or currency but it still interprets the contents as text even though Excel thinks it is now a number or currency.

Thanks again. ncbergst

[gebobs]

In cases such as this, all you need to do is go in and retype one of the characters and I think Excel comes out of its coma and knows its a number. Alternatively, you can do a find/replace for some common character, perhaps a decimal or a dollar sign.