turn off scientific notation?

[Robbie]

I need to turn off scientific notation because when I save files it drops
very relevant numbers. For instance some of my documents have tracking
numbers which are up to 30 digits long it is impossible to track a package
if even 1 number is wrong let a lone half of them.

I realize I can change the format of the cell to number, but the thing is
I'm dealing with CSV documents, a lot of them and I get more and more all
the time on a regular basis. It's just too much work to have to do that on
so many documents I just need this feature turned off. Especially when there
are people less savvy than I who sometimes open these files.

I'm using excel 2002

Thanks

 

[Gord Dibben]

You don't want to change the format to number. Excel will turn all but the
first 15 digits to zeros.

Best if you can change the CSV files to Text then when opening, use the Text
Wizard to designate those 30 digit fields as Text.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

 

[Robbie]

re: format to number. Yeah I figured that out :/

I take it there is no way to specify a default that when opening a file to
allow up to x amount of digits and automatically assume every field as text
instead of general?

 

[Pete_UK]

Well, you could write a macro to do that ...

But, as Gord says these 30 digit numbers have to be treated as text,
so why force them to be text by incorporating some (non-digit)
character in the number? For example:

A123456789012345678901234567890
_123456789012345678901234567890
\123456789012345678901234567890
x123456789012345678901234567890


will all be treated as text by Excel, so you will have no problem
importing and exporting to .csv.

Hope this helps.

Pete