title: SQLplus script to format text as numeric
body: <p>I am selecting rows from a table, but some of the columns are a text type, but they always have numeric data in them.  How can I format them as numbers?</p>
  
  <p>e.g. column quantity heading 'Quantity' format 999,999</p>
  
  <p>However, since the column in the table is text, the numeric formatting is ignored.</p>