Ensure that all numbers are 8 digits long

[DianeG]

Hi

A client of mine imports data into Excel 2003 from an external system. The
numbers vary in length when imported, never more than 6 characters long. The
client always need the numbers to be 8 characters, is there a way to add
zeros to the start of the number to make it 8 characters in length what ever
the original length was?

Thanks in advance

Diane

 

[Mike H]

Possibly a custom format of

00000000

Mike

 

[Pete_UK]

You could put this in an adjacent column:

=TEXT(A1,"00000000")

and copy down, assuming your numbers are in column A. This will
convert the numbers to text values, but would make them all 8 digits
in length with appropriate number of leading zeros. You could fix the
values and then copy these over the values in column A.

Hope this helps.

Pete

 

[DianeG]

Thanks very much Pete and Mike for your responses. Both work perfectly!

 

[Pete_UK]

You're welcome, Diane - thanks for feeding back.

Pete