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Google Sheets Formulas

VALUE Function in Google Sheets: Explained

In this article, you will learn how to use the VALUE formula in Google Sheets.

What does the VALUE formula do in Google Sheets?

The VALUE formula in Google Sheets converts a text string representing a number, date, or time into a number.

For example, suppose you have a text string that looks like a number but has a leading dollar sign or a trailing percentage symbol. In that case, you can use the VALUE formula to extract the numeric value from the string so that you can perform calculations with it.

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How to use the VALUE function in Google Sheets

Here is the syntax for the VALUE formula:

=VALUE(text)

text is the text string that you want to convert to a number.

Note that you can’t convert a number combined with a letter or text (without any numbers) into a number by this formula. For example, you can’t change “?1000” to “1000”, but the formula returns “#VALUE!”. Also, when converting date to a value, the VALUE formula returns a serial number.

For example, if you have the text string "$1,000" in cell A1 and you want to convert it to the number 1000, you can use the following formula:

=VALUE(A1)

This will return the number 1000. You can then use this number in further calculations, such as adding or subtracting it from other numbers.

The following screenshot shows examples of the conversions by the VALUE formula. As you can see, the formula does not work for the two formulas from the bottom because they include text, such as “?” and “LiveFlow”.

How to use the VALUE function in Google Sheets with examples

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