Convert text to number in Libre Calc

Question

I have a spread sheet containing percentages which have a "'" prefix, e.g. "'18.93%". I can't therefore treat them as numbers.

Find and replace cannot find a single instance of "'", so I cannot convert them en masse. How can I automate this conversion?

Older answers to this topic no longer seem to work.

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Implementing suggestion:

Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

LibreOffice ignores the initial single quote for all purposes other than forcing the cell value to be treated as text. That said, in LibreOffice 7.5.9 I was able to do a Find and Replace with:

• Regular expressions: on
• Find: (\d+[.]\d+[%]) (in parentheses to create a capturing group)
• Replace: $1 (also =$1 works)