how can I enter a 21 digit number in a cell & keep it from change

[Guest]

What changes should i make to my set up if I need to be able to enter a
number into a cell that is 20 or more digits long & I want to keep it from
changing to scientific notation (as it does when a number is more than 12
digits long)?
Excel 2003 professional edition

 

[Jake Marx]

Hi alex,

What changes should i make to my set up if I need to be able to enter
a number into a cell that is 20 or more digits long & I want to keep
it from changing to scientific notation (as it does when a number is
more than 12 digits long)?
Excel 2003 professional edition

Putting in 20+ digit numbers will cause you to lose precision (reformat the
cell as number and you'll see what I mean). If that's OK with you, then
you'll probably want to pre-format the range as number or some other format
instead of general. That way, it won't change when you enter long numbers.

If these numbers are account numbers/etc, and you won't be performing
arithmetic on them, you can use an apostrophe at the beginning of the number
to force Excel to treat it as text:

'12345678901234567890123

--
Regards,

Jake Marx
www.longhead.com


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[Paul B]

Alex, if you don't need to do any math with it format the cell as text
before you put the number in or put an ', apostrophe, in front of it

--
Paul B
Always backup your data before trying something new
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