Always format cells general to text in Excel - excel

I am using Microsoft Excel 2010. In that after entering the values for example if i enter "01234" and give enter it changes to "1234". The "0" is getting eliminated. To solve this issue i ll do the following procedure
Right click on the cell --> format cells --> Number Tab --> choose Text in category column.
I hate this process to do often. Is there any solution to predefine it meaning it should always be in "text" whenever i open a new workbook.

You can refer to this link to do what you want:
http://www.pchelps.com/2011/03/productivity-101-setting-up-excel-default-formatting/
Basically, open a workbook and format it in the way you want. Then save that as your template.
An alternative to making your format Text is to use custom formatting. For example if you know that your number will always have 5 digits (sometimes with leading 0s), you can do a custom format with 00000.
In this way, even when you enter manually 123 into the cell, it will be formatted as 00123

Related

Txt document data doesn't format correctly in Excel

Disclaimer - this should be a very simple task, but clearly everything I thought I knew about excel is false.
I'm trying to copy and paste data from a txt document to an excel document. An example of a line I'm trying to copy from the txt doc is: 4512544425701264.
However, when I paste into excel it pastes as 4512544425701260 but displays in the cell as 4.51254E+15. This happens for each line of data.
I've tried numerous ways to fix this problem none have worked including:
Copied the txt data into a Microsoft Word document, then tried
pasting into the excel.
Resized the cell.
Tried each cell formatting option.
Tried opening the txt doc in Excel, even progressed through the text import wizard. Interestingly, I noticed the data preview on page 3 displayed the data correctly. But after proceeding past the importer, the data loaded with the same problem.
Tried on another PC.
Copied and pasting one line at a time.
The only solution I have found is manually typing out each line, however this is highly unpractical due to the large amount of data.
Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.
To show full number rightclick on cell, choose "Format cells..". In "Number" tab choose "Number" category and set "Decimal places" to zero.
Unfortunately excel lets to put only 15 digits as a number. Every additional number is converted to 0, that is why your number 4512544425701264 is converted to 4512544425701260
If you don't need this number to be used in calculation, you can format cells to text format before pasting:
Source on digits limitation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-US/office/troubleshoot/excel/last-digits-changed-to-zeros
In Excel, this is expected behavior (it's Microsoft, after all). I have encountered it frequently when dealing with UPC codes, for example. In order to avoid this, format the cells you are trying to copy this data to as "Text" BEFORE you copy any data over.
Copy your data (CTRL+C), then select the first cell in the range where the data is going, then paste only the values. This should take care of it.
If for some reason you still get scientific notation, provided the cells have the "Text" formatting, you can select that cell, click in the Formula bar and hit ENTER.
When you paste into Excel, try calling "Text import wizard" in the Paste Options. This will allow you to set delimiter (in case of CSV) and later data type of a column where you can select "Text" which will tell wizard not try to convert your data into numbers.

how to store text starting with '+' in excel?

I need to store value like +a1.2.0 in excel cell but after storing it appears as #NAME?
If I double click on it, then only the content appears. If I directly open the excel I should see the content not #NAME?. I am not able to produce it. Any suggestions?
I think this #NAME? appears because of formula it automatically created because of '+' sign before the content.
You may write apostrophe ' before or change the format from General to Text.

Excel data format problem datetime with apostrophe?

We use to upload excel file to our head office software, what their requirement is that apostrophe must be there in start of datetime such as " '2020-05-02 12:31:54.000 " but it should not visible in cell but only in formula bar. As shown in first Q1 selected cell below:
My programming script fetch data with apostrophe, then I manually select cell one by one and press F2 then enter which fulfill my requirement but the problem is it takes alot of time. Is there any shortcut for this, I tried formating, Data and someformula but nothing work for me.
Problem solved by just replacing apostrophe with an apostrophe. :)

Why do numeric hyperlinks make an entire cell clickable and the text uneditable?

I have notice that if you insert a hyperlink into any cell in Excel and set the text to display to be a number (1, for example), it causes the entire cell to now be clickable in addition to preventing you from changing the hyperlink text afterwards. If you try to change the hyperlink text by going to Edit Hyperlink the Text to Display is always Selection in Document.
If you do the exact same thing but make the Text to Display an alpha character (like a), it works just fine and you can edit the hyperlink Text to Display without issue.
This is causing problems because I am trying to read Excel data using Interop libraries and even those libraries are unable to read the Text to Display when it is set as a whole number with no decimal places.
If you create a Hyperlink like:
You can later edit the "Friendly Name" by selecting the cell and doing the edit in the Formula Bar.

Paste from SQL to Excel... Excel wants to think for me

Group I am pasting data from SQL to Excel and it appears that Excel is trying to read my mind by converting some of my numbers to dates. I.e. one number is 2-2131 and when I paste it to excel it shows Feb-31 even 2-3291 wnats to be Feb-61
STOP IT EXCEL!
This is driving me crazy and I can't seem to find an easy way around this. I tried "paste special" as text and it still formats. I can get it to work if I create a connection and use the query, but I just want to be able to copy-paste data for testing purposes.
Anyone have an easy solution to my headache?
Thanks in advance!
Format the column as text before pasting the text.
Select the cells ahead of time and mark the formatting as Text. (Format->Cells, select "Text" from Categories and click OK). Then paste your data.
Hit F-2 before you paste the code and then it just puts it into one cell.
Highlight the affected row, right click, choose Format Cells..., select Text before you paste the data.
After pasting the sql data to excel, change the date and time format of excel to simple numbers seprated by dashes. That way round even if excel would assume it to be date, it would display the numbers as it is.

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