Fixing trailing minus signs

Switch minus sign from right to left

By Neale Blackwood

Some systems download negative values into Excel with the minus sign on the right of the number instead of the left. Excel doesn’t recognize this as a negative number, in fact, it treats it like text.

Here is a formula to correct a trailing minus sign. This formula assumes the number is in cell A1.

=IF(RIGHT(A1,1)=”-“,LEFT(A1,LEN(A1)-1)*-1,A1)

You could enter this formula in another column, then copy the corrected entries and then use Paste Special > Values on top of the existing data to correct it. You could then delete the formulas.