You can amend the list, in place, using the "Text to columns" function.
Simply select the affected cells, go to Data > text to columns (either via menus or on ribbon if 2007 or later), accept the default choice "delimited", go Next, clear all selections (so Tab is cleared as a delimiter), next, accept choice of General format for cells, Finish. The leading apostrophes are simply dropped along the way.
You can apply this to multiple columns as well.
Job done.
Also useful if there are other character(s) at begining or end of text, you can specifiy these as the delimiter characters (one can by specified in "other" as well), although this will meant that they move across by one column (or more if there are multiple sequential occurences but a tick in the "treat as one" box fixes that). So I thought it would be a useful answer as it covers a more general method, which also works for things like splitting names into first name surname by delimiting at spaces and so on.