16th digit in the cell changes to a zero??

[Guest]

Our company uses a program that has some inventory items that are 16
numerical digits long. When I run an export to a csv file. I notice that
after opening the file, all the cells that have skus which are 16 digits
long, get changed to end with a zero instead of the real number. After some
labored testing, I finally decided to try to manually input a sample number
into excel and noticed that the 16th digit gets changed everytime to a zero.
Is there a fix or way to keep this from happening?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Roman

 

[Niek Otten]

Excel's precision for numbers is 15 significant digits.
If an identifying item, such as credit card number or product number has to
be used, don't treat it as a number, since it is not meant to calculate
with.
Treat is as text can be done in several ways: enter an apostrophe before
entering the number (the apostrophe will not show) or format the cells as
text before entering the numbers.
Or have the exporting program export something like A12345678901234567 (add
an "A") and remove the A in Excel.

--

Kind Regards,

Niek Otten

Microsoft MVP - Excel

 

[Dave Peterson]

But if you can see the 16th digit before you save the file, you'll be able to
see the 16th digit in the CSV file--if you open that file in notepad (or
anyother text editor).

But when you reopen the .csv file in excel, excel will "fix" your data (like
Niek wrote).

You could rename the .csv file to .txt, then when you reopen that file (via
File|open), you'll be able to specify each field type--including text for those
long digit strings.