Graph cells with "footnotes"

I have some data that has an attempt a footnotes consisting of * and superscript numbers after the data and at the bottom of the table I have a notes section. Some of my data also has < . I want to graph this ignoring the notes and < but still using the data in these cells. is there an easy way to do this or do I have to create a duplicate the table and remove these characters each time I want a new graph (the data is always being updated)

Example of my data
Column A
1/1/02
4/2/02
7/1/02
11/7/02*
2/3/03
6/15/03

Column B
1200
456
<0.05
364*
<0.05
34**

some of the column be have super script number but I don't know how to show that here

I don't know of a way to do this without creating a different graph range that strips out the characters. Otherwise Excel doesn't know if it is text or a number or a date, so it treats it as a string of text.


Steve=True