I'm not sure if it would or not. I wouldn't do that without testing it first. But, you could do a search and return that field and download the results in an excel spreadsheet, change the values to numeric in Excel and then re-import them after you've changed it to a numeric value. Not sure if it'll break other things though, for instance if you guys have multi-currency a lot of saved searches/reports try to convert the currency to your base currency, returning a string as a numeric value is a way to get around that problem.