how to enter telephone numbers in Excel sheet

[Guest]

when i uploaded my Phone Book from my Mobile into Excel sheet i am unable to
see the correct number but it appears like 1.79511E+15 and also when i remove
the first few numbers like country code etc still the number appears to be
wrong with so many zeros at the end (like last 4-5 numbers appear as "0")i am
unable to get the correct number. Please help to retrive the correct numbers.

Thanking You in Advance

 

[Nick]

You need to format the cells as text to stop excel interpreting the data you
have entered as numbers.

Nick

 

[Guest]

Dear Nick,

Can i format the cell as text now to already saved excel sheet, where i have
saved my Phone Numbers.

 

[Gord Dibben]

UMA

Won't do you any good to Format after the fact.

Format a column as Text then re-paste the numbers.


Gord Dibben Excel MVP

 

[David McRitchie]

If you had included spaces when you created them, you would
have no problem because they would be text. Since the
lengths of phone numbers vary, I'm not sure how you got away with just digits
and had leading zeros..

Excel is limited to 15 digits, if you exceed that your phone numbers
are no good, and you would have to fix your input, or what might work
is to change the extension of your input from .csv to .txt so that the
Text Import Wizard comes up. Then indicate that the column is
delimited, and later on that specific columns are text.

Otherwise, if you can't do that...
Try Formatting under Format, cells, custom as 000 000 000 0000
whatever it takes to format the digits so that you can retain
leading zeros.

For instance if you numbers looked like
91 33 22445566 you would format as 00 00 00000000
011 91 33 22445566 you would format as 000 00 00 00000000

Once you get them correct, I would consider using a macro to change
them to text i.e. cell.value = "'" & cell.text

 

[Guest]

Dear Mr.David McRitchie,

Thank you very much, your suggestion has helped me partly. I could retrieve
few numbers except for those with zeros in the end. Like first 4 numbers are
ok but after that all are zero's. i couldn't retrieve this but others were ok.

Thank you once again.

 

[David McRitchie]

Did you create a custom format to match the format of your phone numbers
ahead of time. Of course I think it will only work if all your phone numbers
are the same length.