How can I use html data in an excel spreadsheet?

Question

when I paste it in excel doesn't recognize it as numbers.

Answer 1

HTML is text.  A number in HTML is a text representation of a number.

Are you copying this from a web site?  (Paste it into Word.  Copy it.  Edit it so you only have the numbers you want.  Paste Special it into Excel as Unicode.)  (I do this every week, transferring tables from a .pdf file into Excel.  I'd like to introduce the customer to a Guillotine, but ...)

Or are you trying to paste the HTML source into EXCEL?  (Copy only the digits themselves - lots of work.)