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I'm trying to process some data in Excel. The data includes numeric account numbers and other long numeric strings (like cell phone MEIDs). I am not doing math operations on these strings, so I want Excel to treat them as plain text.

Here is what is making me nuts (this is Excel 2010):

  1. Take a long number like 1240800388917 and paste it in a cell in a new worksheet.
  2. Excel's default cell format is general, so the string is presented in scientific notation as 1.2408E+12
  3. Right click on the cell, select Format Cells, set the format to Text

The cell is still displayed in scientific notation, even though the format has been set to text.

Now, if I do the steps in a different order:

  1. Format an empty cell as text. Right click on the cell, select Format Cells, set the format to Text
  2. Take a long number like 1240800388917 and paste it in to the text formatted cell

Now, the cell is displayed as a string and not in scientific notation.

The results remaining in scientific notation even though the cell is formatted as text just seems broken to me. I've seen suggested work-arounds like: use CSV import and set the format to text, add a space character to the beginning of each numeric string, and others.

Is there a simple good work around to easily keep these strings formatted as text?

Why on earth does Excel do this?

Related SU questions I found: How can you make Excel 2007 stop formatting large numbers as scientific notation? and Is this Excel behaviour with a large hex number expected?

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The long number 1240800388917 is copied from another cell? Or just plain text, like from Notepad? – wilson Apr 17 '12 at 6:56

4 Answers

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Ah, memories of data munging back from when I did some massive number cross checking in Excel (never again).. When you punch in long numeric strings into Excel, try say, 12345678901234567890 (20 digits), Excel will generally convert it for you, meaning that the 20 digit number you've just tapped in has been cut back to be only about fifteen significant figures.

Note as well: the conversion is a truncation, as opposed to rounding. (12345678901234567890 is 1.23456789012346E+19, but excel will show you 1.23456789012345E+19)

This occurs at point of entry, so once it's in, any additional detail is lost, and so even if you tell Excel that you really meant that was text, and not a number, you're kind of out of luck, and hence why your first sequence doesn't work.

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Yes, I see that behavior when my numeric string has more than 15 significant digits. 12345678901234567890 becomes 1.23456789012345E+19 as you say. When I click on the cell, the edit box shows the string truncated and padded with zeros as 12345678901234500000. What is odd is that it does the same thing for numbers that don't overflow excel's 15 digit limit. If I paste in 12345678901234, it is displayed as 1.23457E+13, but when I click it the edit box still shows the original string. Now, what is odd is if I format this cell to text, it still shows in scientific notation. Annoying. – Michael Levy Apr 17 '12 at 14:39
1  
That one is a little bit of a display quirk actually - setting the format from general to text wont immediately show it as the original string, but if you go in and edit the data (as in, just click into the edit zone and click out) it'll update to be exactly what you put in. – tanantish Apr 17 '12 at 17:27
up vote 5 down vote

A single apostrophe ' before a number will force Excel to treat a number as text (including a default left align). And if you have errors flagged, it will show as a number stored as text error on the cell.

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up vote 3 down vote

I found that in Office 2010, if you format the column first, and then paste in the data, it will show the large numbers correctly.

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That is probably because it is stored as a string. What happens if you make another cell be, say, the cell's content multiplied by 2? – Peter Mortensen Jan 11 at 12:15
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Select all the cells — or, to make things easy — select the entire spreadsheet and click Format Cells, then Text.

Automatically, your whole spreadsheet will use text. You don't have to do it cell by cell.

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