unwanted scientific notation

[Paul Pedersen]

I populated a column by pasting in a list of account numbers. Excel
displayed them all in scientific notation, obviously not useful in this
situation.

I formatted the column as text, but that did not change the display. But
having done so, if I now double click in a cell to edit it, the display
corrects itself and stays corrected even if I exit the cell with no changes.
But I can't double click on each cell - there are more than a thousand of
them. How can I correct the formatting of all cells at once?

 

[Earl Kiosterud]

Paul,

Try changing the formatting to Number with 0 decimal places.

Note that numbers with more than 15 decimal digits will get truncated (true of all true
numbers in Excel). You have to have formatted the cell for text before entering such a
number.

--
Earl Kiosterud
www.smokeylake.com

Note: Some folks prefer bottom-posting. But if you bottom-post to a reply that's already
top-posted, the thread gets messy. When in Rome.

 

[Paul Pedersen]

That worked fine until I converted them back to text. Then they reverted to
scientific notation again.

Some of these account numbers have letters in them, so they get formatted as
text automatically. Others are all numerals, and I can't get Excel to treat
them as text.

 

[Earl Kiosterud]

Paul,

I don't know what you mean by "convert them back to text," and why you need to do it. I
should think using number format would be OK. The Number number formatting should affect
only the all-digit account numbers, the ones that Excel types as numbers. The account
numbers with alpha characters should be treated as text, and should appear exactly as they
are (unaffected by Number formatting). The only thing I should think remains would be to
left or right-align them, as the default is for numbers to align right in the cell, and the
text to align left. If that isn't so, can you give some examples?