Why numbers from a PDF show as text in Excel, and how to fix it
Last updated: 17 October 2026
The green triangle, sums that return zero, and sorting that goes 1, 10, 2 - and the fix.
The symptoms
- A small green triangle in the corner of cells.
- SUM returns 0 or ignores some cells.
- Sorting puts 10 before 2.
- Amounts are left-aligned instead of right-aligned.
Why it happens
Text copied from a PDF carries formatting characters: thousands separators, currency signs, brackets for negatives, a trailing minus, Dr or Cr, or invisible spaces. Excel does not recognise these as numbers, so it keeps them as text.
How the converter handles it
Each column is converted as a whole: when most of a column is numbers, every number in it becomes a real number with a matching format (for example #,##0.00). Brackets and a trailing minus become negative numbers, percentages become real percentages, and the currency sign becomes part of the number format.
Columns that only look numeric - phone numbers, PIN codes, account numbers and codes with leading zeros - are deliberately kept as text, because turning them into numbers would change them.