Have you ever had a spreadsheet where the numbers did not align properly or add up correctly. Excel could think the numbers are text.
When you have an unformatted cell and you enter text, like the word hello, the text will align left. If you type a number the cell should align right. This is how you can tell what Excel thinks is the type of information in a cell.
Why is this important? In older versions of Excel only cells that Excel recognised had numbers in them were used within calculations. So if you summed a column but the total did not add up as it should have it was probably because some of the numbers were not included.
Sometimes you might want Excel to treat a number like text, leaving spaces and leading zeros, again why? Telephone numbers are the most common, central London numbers start with 0207 but if you type that into a cell Excel will remove the 0 and leave 207, not so good if you don’t know it has done this.
Numbers that Excel think are text are not formatted the same so it is better to know what Excel thinks is in the cell. Next time you enter anything in cells take a look at how Excel automatically aligns them.