Hi there, dumb question (Oracle 8)

I have created a table in Oracle8, of which there are several fields of type NUMBER (Length 22, Scale 2, Precision 38).

When data is inserted into this table, and the table viewed via ODBC to say Access, or VB, the fields I was expecting to be numerical are in fact textual.

And when I view the tables directly on the Oracle db using a GUI (such as PL/SQL developer), the same fields have the data aligned left, as if they are textual.

Any ideas? I need to have these field viewed as numerical. Do I need to change the data type structure of the table?