How to remove white space from a number

I have a column of number with white spaces in them. Like this: "32 445 423". How do I get rid of all the white space to get excel to treat it as numbers rather than strings?

EDIT: Let me fill in some additional information that has come to light. My goal is to turn "32 445 423" into a 32445423. If I write in the string "32 445 423" into excel and use =SUBSTITUTE(A1;" ";"") it removes the spaces just fine. But the numbers I have are imported from a csv file. When running SUBSTITUTE on the imported numbers only leading and trailing spaces are removed.

I believe your imported data includes non-breaking spaces instead of standard spaces. Hence, the formula =SUBSTITUTE(A1," ","") does not work. Instead of using the space bar to type the " " in the SUBSTITUTE formula, try a non-breaking space. You can select this in the Character Map or use keystroke Alt+0160.

EDIT:

Since substituting regular spaces successfully removed the leading and trailing spaces, you should use nested Substitute formulas: one to sub the regular spaces and one to remove the no-break spaces.

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1," ","")," ","")

You can copy this formula to try it in your workbook.

Just do a search and replace over a group of cells you have selected, select your column and go to Home and Find and Select. Search for a space, and replace it with nothing.

Alternately if you want to retain the originally formatted number you can use the substitute function to provide a revised version of the string in another cell:

=SUBSTITUTE(A2," ","")

It sounds like you want to extract the numbers and put them in to separate columns. You can use the "Text to Columns" command, which is located on the Data tab (in Excel 2007). This walks you through a series of dialog boxes letting you specify how the fields are delimited and how you want the numbers formatted.