Conditional formatting of numbers which include a < sign.

I wish to use conditional formatting to highlight values to that exceed a specific standard. I have a significant amount of data and this would be a huge time saver. Included in the lab data are a significant number of values that are expressed as <0.05 for example. Because of the < sign conditional formatting does not recognise that cell as a number, and therefore the conditional formatting won't work. I'm curious to see if there are any thoughts out there on a work around, or if there is a way to tell conditional formatting to ignore the < sign and look at the number. To put it in persepctive I have probably 10,000 values that need to be compared against various criteria. probably 50-60% of the values have the < sign.

I understand how conditional formatting works. I am stuck on the issue of < sign in the cell with the number.


Cheers.
Thanks for any thoughts in advance.