Prices with dollar signs won't add up in Excel — fix currency stored as text
Prices like $19.99 refusing to SUM in Excel? If the dollar sign was typed or imported as a literal character, the cell holds text, not a number formatted as currency. Here's how to tell the difference and fix it
Two different things that both look like a priced value
Formatting and value are separate concepts in Excel. Type 19.99 into a cell and apply the Currency number format, and Excel stores 19.99 while displaying it with a dollar sign — the symbol lives entirely in the formatting layer. But paste in a value from a system that writes prices as literal text strings, and there's no formatting layer at all; the dollar sign is just the first character of a piece of text, and arithmetic functions can't do math on text.
How to check which one you actually have
Numbers right-align in a cell by default; text left-aligns. If your priced column is left-aligned even though it displays a dollar sign, that's a strong sign you're looking at text. Try summing a small range directly — if SUM returns 0 for cells that clearly have values in them, or #VALUE! appears when you add two of them with a plus sign, the text diagnosis is confirmed.
Removing the symbol and converting back to real numbers
Use Find and Replace to remove the dollar sign (and any thousands-separator commas) from the column, which leaves a plain numeric-looking string behind. Then run Data > Text to Columns and click Finish, or wrap the values in a helper column with =VALUE(A2), to convert that string into a genuine number. Only after that's done should you apply Excel's Currency number format, so the dollar sign comes back as display formatting rather than as a literal character stuck to the front of text.