title: Excel: Pasting "USD 12.50" data into a sheet -> can a custom number format treat this as a number ON PASTE ACTION?
body: <p>Helping a close friend at risk of losing her job; we spent hours this weekend where I tried to help her automate a recurring task.</p>
  <ol>
  <li>She pastes (from some source I don't know) a table containing one field in particular that has to be managed. The values are:</li>
  </ol>
  <p>&quot;USD 12.50&quot;   - for example - without the quotes</p>
  <p>ISSUE: this column of values can't be summed/operated on, as it's not formatted as a number</p>
  <ol start="2">
  <li>She was using the MID function; I know there are some text operators that can handle this and all -- but I said we need to move beyond this, cause manually converting all these values each time, screwing with the column order (adding new ones just to extract the # value), etc. are a bit error-prone. I also showed her Flash Fill before, but that's not what I'm looking for.</li>
  </ol>
  <p><strong>My bottom line question is this:</strong></p>
  <p>Is it possible to have that column we KNOW the &quot;USD 12.50&quot; or &quot;USD 49.99&quot; text values are going to be inputted into (perhaps paste values is part of the answer) --&gt; is it possible for it to STAY as a Custom Number field that is EXPECTING &quot;USD &quot; string + a float afterwards?</p>
  <p>If you &quot;dumb paste&quot; into Excel, I'm guessing it wipes out the custom number format you might have pre-formatted?</p>
  <p>(Last bonus request: I have been playing with this for at least an hour, but I cannot for the life of my figure out how to do that custom number format in the first place <em>AND</em> have the values across cells eligible for summing, min/max/etc. etc... man, I know a bit of RegEx but I am really struggling with custom number formats.)</p>
  <p>Thanks in advance &amp; sorry for the length.</p>