Sometimes numbers stored as text are useful. For example, if you have telephone numbers in Excel, if the numbers aren't stored as text then leading zeros are dropped (e.g. 01234567890 would change to 1234567890).
Also, it's easy enough to see when numbers are stored as text (via visual cues and the format type field).
That said, perhaps the formulas could be made more flexible. Excel formulas are somewhat Lisp-like, it'd be great if Excel had Lisp-style macros for customising formulas. Probably won't happen though. Microsoft is developing the 'Power BI' side of Excel, I could see it becoming more common to create custom functions with M or DAX when the related editing functionality improves.
Comments
Sometimes numbers stored as text are useful. For example, if you have telephone numbers in Excel, if the numbers aren't stored as text then leading zeros are dropped (e.g. 01234567890 would change to 1234567890).
Also, it's easy enough to see when numbers are stored as text (via visual cues and the format type field).
That said, perhaps the formulas could be made more flexible. Excel formulas are somewhat Lisp-like, it'd be great if Excel had Lisp-style macros for customising formulas. Probably won't happen though. Microsoft is developing the 'Power BI' side of Excel, I could see it becoming more common to create custom functions with M or DAX when the related editing functionality improves.