Turning “$1,234.50” and “(45.00)” into numbers

Numbers exported from accounting tools, shops and banks are formatted for people, not for formulas. A cell that shows $1,234.50 is text to most tools, so sums ignore it and sorting puts $9 after $10.

What the number step removes

• Currency symbols and codes: $ € £ ¥ ₹, USD, EUR and others.
• Thousands separators: commas, apostrophes (1'234.50) and spaces, including the non-breaking spaces French and German exports use.
• Accounting negatives: (45.00) and the trailing minus 45.00- both become -45.00.

Grouping is checked strictly: 1,5 is not read as 15 or as 1.5 unless you say the file uses a decimal comma. Values that cannot be read are left unchanged and counted in a warning, so nothing becomes a wrong number silently.

Decimal comma files

Much of Europe writes one thousand two hundred and thirty-four point five as 1.234,5. Tick Input uses a decimal comma and the step reads it correctly. Output always uses a decimal point, which is what databases and most software expect.

Percentages

Choose whether 12.5% stays as it is, becomes 12.5, or becomes the fraction 0.125 (what spreadsheet formulas use).

Rounding

With Decimals set, values are rounded half away from zero on the digits themselves, not through floating point, so 1.005 becomes 1.01 and long IDs are never altered. Leave it at Keep as written to only strip formatting.

Leave IDs alone

ZIP codes, phone numbers and account numbers look numeric but are identifiers: 02134 must keep its leading zero. The cleaner only suggests columns that carry formatting such as currency symbols and never suggests columns with leading zeros. When you download XLSX, values with leading zeros stay text.

Open the cleaner