It has been a particularly geeky day for the Poorhouse today as it happens. Ugh. So let's celebrate with the latest of his Excel discoveries designed to allow an optimum amount of user laziness in between the awful clicking between cells, formulae that make sense only to Stephen Hawking and charts formatted so horrifically that it must have been intentional.

This one's a macro to solve the insanely annoying "Number stored as text" error, which usually occurs when copying and pasting data from elsewhere, or when an idiotic, deserves-to-be-spat-on colleague sends you something that is either exhibiting a remarkable level of stupidity or a deliberate wind-up.

Yes, it looks like a number, but you can't use it in formulae, sort it properly, chart it or otherwise use it in a way that approximates "maths". Trying to format the cells as number is the obvious solution, btu seems not to work most of time. There are ways and means, one for example involving obscure paste special sub-features, but they're all faffing. The obvious answer is to highlight all cells, attempt to click the tiny error exclamation mark symbol, and choose "Convert to number". But clearly that is a nuisance in itself, particularly in the most likely situation that you have a) a load of cells to do, and b) poor mouse control.

So of course, in the words of MC Macro, it's macro time. A mere 6-liner this time, courtesy of Matt H, a commenter of Daily Dose of Excel. reproduced below.

Shove that into a workbook or an addin or similar, and simply highlight all the cells that have the problem, or the whole worksheet (you can safely use it on text cells that aren’t pure numbers and it won’t mess anything up). Then run the macro, and your non-numbers are numbers. Whoo! Or for ultimate geek-elite-laziness, make a toolbar button or keyboard shortcut to run it for you. Joy. Every second saved in Excel is...one more second you don't have to be in it.