I think this has been my problem. I’m moving text often from websites into Calc. If I move a number from that website I guess it is interpreting that as text instead of a number. I’ll just have to streamline plain text pasting and I’ll be fine. I’ve been doing that more and more and it’s working.
Note that an added cause of confusion is that some formatting alters how Calc interprets input. Cell preformatted to number format “text” will usually translate input to data type text. Date and proper fraction formats may also override defaults.