it looks like my version of excel gets a little green mark in the top left corner if it is a number being stored as text, and lets you right click and say change to number to fix.
Excel help also gives you this little hack to fix them. (similar to shawnski's, but maybe a little quicker)
In an empty cell, enter the number 1.
Select the cell, and on the Edit menu, click Copy.
Select the range of numbers stored as text you want to convert.
On the Edit menu, click Paste Special.
Under Operation, click Multiply.
Click OK.
Delete the content of the cell entered in the first step.
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