How to save a number as a String in Excel? - excel

How to save a number as a String in Excel?
When I try to enter a number, 00112233, Excel automatically formats it as 112233 and saving it as number. But I want the preceeding 0's not to be truncated and save the number as string.
As a workaround I'm using quotes ("") to save the actual string.
Any suggestion...??

If you put a single quote in front of the number, it will be stored as text.

If you pre-format the input cells with TEXT format you can just enter 00112233 or whatever and it will display as entered and be stored as text. To do that select a cell or range of cells and right click - in dialog box choose "Format Cells" and then in the next box choose Number > Text
Note you can't change to TEXT format after input, or rather you can change the format but it has no effect!

You need to use single quotes to keep it as text:
'00112233
Will store 00112233 in the cell.
Otherwise, if you have many cells already in number format, and you need them to be in text format with 8 digits (including zeros), you can use the formula on the data:
=text(A1,"00000000")
(there are 8 zeros there)
Then, copy the column containing the formula, paste in place as values (Paste Special > Values) and delete the previous column.

Related

Is there a way to display a number more than 12 characters whose format is TEXT

I know how to display a number more than 12 characters whose format is Number.
However, I downloaded an excel and when I open the sheet, I saw like "47821E+12" and I changed the format to TEXT but It won't change.
It still shows "47821E+12".
However, When I double click the cell and enter, It shows right like "47821573839123"
Is there an automated way to solve this problem?
Thanks
If your character count is smaller than 16, you can simply convert the cell type into 'number' which gives you the exact format instead of scientific one.
Update
If the cells has non-numeric charracters, you can try to convert the contents of cells via
=TEXT(A1, "0")
in a new cell, where A1 is the cell has scientific display.

Remove ' from cell, but keep cell content as text

I am looking to remove the ' before the content of a cell in order to do a VLookup, whowever when there are no letters it is turning the value into a number and the vlookup is retrieving inaccurate values. Any idea?
pre - '02364W105
post - 02364W105
pre - '151290889
post - 151290889 (this becomes 1.51E+08)
Change the cell format to Numbers and it does change the style. Normally it should work without it though.
You ha ve to select all these cells and change format to Number.
Probably they will still include the " ' " until you edit each one from the formula bar or pressing F2 and then ENTER.
The best way to avoid editing one by one is to write "1" into an empy cell, then copy it, then select all the cells you want to convert to number, then paste special, select "values" and "multiply".
This will convert all you cells with number formatted as text into numeric cells with numbers inside.

Number value as text

I have a single cell with the value:
426,427,433,439,442
This isn't a number, rather a list of numbers. If I try to add another number to the list, for example, 679. Excel changes the cell to read:
679,426,427,433,439,000
If I select the cell and format it as "text", it changes to:
4.26427E+14
I've tried various cell formatting options, but I can't seem to get Excel to treat these numbers like text.
Copy and paste the column into Notepad, format a new column in Excel as text. In Notepad select all, copy it back out from Notepad into the column in Excel that you formatted for text.
First place a single quote (apostrophe) in front of the set of numbers and add the latest value at the end appropriate position.
add (apostrophe) in front of numbers
add (comma's) between
add any number by adding a (comma)
Possibly:
=LEFT(A1,3)&","&MID(A1,4,3)&","&MID(A1,7,3)&","&MID(A1,10,3)&","&MID(A1,13,3)
It seems you have a number 426427433439442 with the commas purely a presentational aspect of the formatting. I take it you want the commas and the only way now may be to insert them.

How to remove the first letter in each cell in a column in excel?

I have column in excel like below,
'04-Feb-01
'04-Mar-01
'08-Apr-01
'06-May-01
'03-Jun-01
'08-Jul-01
'05-Aug-01
I want to remove the character ' in all cells how can i do that?
I already tried with =RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-1) this one.. not working
Convert the text to a date using DATEVALUE. Then apply a date format to your liking.
When you enter data into a cell, Excel will try and convert it to the correct type (is it text, a number or a date) The single quote is Excel's way of saying treat what follows as text. It comes in handy when entering things like telephone numbers which Excel might think is a number and would not display leading zeros. In your the example the actual value in the cell is the text without the single quote, you can check this by copying a cell and then pasting into notepad and there would be no quote in the result.
Why do you want to remove the quote? If it is because you want the cells to contain a date rather than text you can convert it using the DATEVALUE function or by using copy and paste special values only .

How do I prevent values being shown as # in excel

I have a cell which is formatted as Text field with wrap text on. The values are shown as "#" when I move away from the cell, how do I prevent it?
Try to expand the column size (width). If this doesn't help try to format the cell as General instead of Text.
When this happens to me I just have to expand the column size so that the content fits perfectly within the cell.
More about it here:
Excel - #### sign in cell formatted "Wrap Text"

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