yogi_Coerce NUMERICS As TEXT Into True NUMERICS And Then Operate On Those With A Function Such As The Sum Function

                                          Google Spreadsheet   Post  #1177
Yogi Anand, D.Eng, P.E.      ANAND Enterprises LLC -- Rochester Hills MI     www.energyefficientbuild.com.   May 07, 2013
user Anna Sakoyan (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/docs/spreadsheets/ErSBlxgFtuY)
Google Spreadsheets Text to Numbers
I realise this question must have been asked already (as well as answered), but I failed to find any up-to-date discussions.
My problem is that i've got numbers (imported from Excel), which look like this: 182.74, 187.83, 192.57... etc. That is, there's a dot inside each number. The spreadsheet interprets them as text, because the =SUM formula returns 0. I tried to apply this http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/docs/UWZSduP_-L4 /=ArrayFormula( IFERROR(A1:A3 * 1 ; A1:A3))/ (and I entered the range I needed, of course), but it didn't work for me. So is there a way to somehow convert this to numbers so that I can use formulas (or build charts)?
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The problem here is NUMERICS as TEXT ... these need to be coerced into True NUMERICs before they can be operated on with a function such as the SUM function ...

as discussed in the following