NUMBERVALUE Function in Zoho Sheet: Syntax, Examples and Troubleshooting

• Introduced: Added in November 2022, according to Zoho’s release history; no numbered cloud release is given.
• Availability: Currently documented in Zoho Sheet’s rolling web-service help; no final supported-version endpoint is identified.
• Scope: The web documentation is the checked reference. Mobile parity and behavior after exchanging files with other applications are not separately established.
• Checked: October 14, 2026, against the official NUMBERVALUE page, with independently calculated examples. No native Zoho Sheet test.

=NUMBERVALUE(text; decimal_separator; group_separator)

The official syntax line displays all three argument names without optional brackets. Its remarks explicitly permit omitting both separators, in which case the current locale supplies them. For an imported column, supplying both separators is more reproducible than depending on the workbook’s locale.

When a separator argument contains more than one character, Zoho documents using only its first character. The function also documents removing spaces, converting an empty string to zero, and processing percentage suffixes. The examples use ordinary ASCII spaces; no general promise about every Unicode space is made here.

Create headers in A1:D1: Source text, Decimal, Group, Number. Enter each column-A expression as a formula, including the equals sign, so the quoted source stays text rather than being automatically parsed on entry. Type the separator text directly into columns B and C, without enclosing quotes. In row 4, C4 contains one ordinary space.

In D2, enter =NUMBERVALUE(A2;B2;C2) and fill down through D9. Use Number formatting with enough decimal places to see the small row-7 result. In E2, enter =ISNUMBER(D2); the expected result is TRUE. ISNUMBER checks the value type rather than how the cell is displayed.

Row 8 tests a zero-length text formula, not an untouched blank cell. Row 9 demonstrates the documented first-character rule for separator arguments; prefer a single character in ordinary workbooks because it communicates the intent more clearly.

Zoho’s explicit example says NUMBERVALUE("5%%") has the same numerical result as applying two percentage operators, 0.0005. Each percentage suffix scales by one hundredth: 5/100/100 = 0.0005. It does not mean adding 5% to another 5%.

If you format the numeric 0.25 from D6 as Percentage, it displays as 25%. If you format D7’s 0.0005 as Percentage, it displays as 0.05%. Do not multiply by 100 and then apply Percentage formatting, which would count the conversion twice.

Suppose the amounts in rows 2–5 all refer to the same currency and unit, but their source files use different punctuation. Keep the original strings in A and the explicit source conventions in B:C. Enter =SUM(D2:D5) in D11; the expected numeric total is 13564.22.

The negative row is a credit in this example, so it reduces the total. NUMBERVALUE has only text/separator arguments; it has no exchange-rate or currency-code input. If the rows represent different currencies, a common number format is not enough to make them addable. See SUM for the separate numeric aggregation step.

An integer string without grouping or a decimal mark avoids the separator ambiguity: =NUMBERVALUE("1000") is expected to return 1000. By contrast, a string such as 1,234 can represent different quantities under different separator conventions. Use the source schema, not visual guessing, to choose B and C.

The grouping separator is ignored when it occurs in the whole-number part, before the decimal separator. The page does not fully specify identical decimal/group characters, repeated signs, every currency-symbol string or every Unicode whitespace sequence. Do not silently strip arbitrary characters and call the result a faithful conversion.

• Keep the raw text until the converted values have been checked.
• Check the source convention when a plausible-looking number has the wrong magnitude.
• Preserve the distinction between a source empty string converted to zero and a genuinely recorded numeric zero.
• Do not use IFERROR to conceal every malformed import without a separate exception report.

The expected values were checked with exact decimal arithmetic and explicit separator rules; locale-default parsing and undocumented coercion are not certified by those calculations.