Excel's VALUE function has only one argument: where a is the value stored as text that you want to convert into a number.

If the Excel cell format is not changing to a number because the Number formatting is not working, take these steps to fix the issue. Remove both the Decimal and Thousand separators Numbers are ...

Microsoft Excel normally does not let users change the values of protected cells. To edit a protected cell, you must first remove its protected status. You can do this using either Excel's ribbon ...

In a program like Excel, which is designed to handle numbers, you'd expect to be able to use fractions without any hiccups.