>1e5 or 1d4 should be treated as numeric by isnumeric function. In fact, Sergey has a blog on this very topic
>http://berezniker.com/content/pages/sql/microsoft-sql-server/isnumericex-udf-data-type-aware

This is a sophisticated technique. Thanks for the reference

However, this one also uses the WHERE approach. Thus, all records not eligible will not be taken into consideration. I am looking at including all records but to convert the non numeric values from the character field into 0, when this is not something that SQL Server could convert. I do not know if that is possible.