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Rosewood
 
Posts: n/a
Default Stop excel from dropping the 0 in the beginning of a number?

I am saving it as XLS file.

"**Gail**" wrote:

How are you saving the file? Are you saving as XLS or resaving as CSV or TXT?


"Rosewood" wrote in message
...
:I am glad that someone else has also tried the 3 solutions that were
: suggested without success. In my case, the some of the numbers start with
: zeros and some do not, depending on the OEM- which eliminates the "special
: formatting" option. Unfortunately, the various OEM's are not isolated, but
: combined in the same columns. Also, if the number is alpha-numeric, Excel
: sometimes changes the format to scientific- even after the sheet has been
: proofed and saved.
:
: Is there no way to format all the cells in a sheet in the "text" format and
: make it stick?
:
: "Mo" wrote:
:
: This is exactly the problem I have in trying to save ISBN numbers which
: often begin with a zero. I have tried all three methods you have suggested.
: Once the text in the column appears correct, I save it in the xls format,
: and can open it in excel correctly. But then I save it into the tab
: delimited.txt file. When I open the text file in wordpad, I can see the
: numbers are fine, with the leading zero correctly in place. Then I open
: the file again in excel, and the zeros have been dropped. This is a
: problem, because I must upload my books in a tab delimited file to Amazon,
: but the zeros disappear, so they don't load my books.
: Mo
:
: "George King" wrote in message
: ...
: Three ways:
: 1 - You can create a custom format (Format, Cells, Custom) and enter the
: number of zeros that you want to see digits for.
: Example, if you want to see a total of 4 digits, even if you only enter 2
: or
: 3, enter a custom format like "0000". Excel will display "0012" when you
: enter 12. Note that Excel only stores the 12, but displays it as 0012.
:
: 2 - Format the cell as Text
:
: 3 - Enter an apostorphe first, then the number - like '0012
: Excel will not display the apostrophe, just the 0012.
: Note that Excel will treat this as text, not a number - won't calculate
: anything when it's formated as text.
: --
: George
:
:
: "Rosewood" wrote:
:
: I do a lot of spreadsheet with number that start with one or more zeros.
: Not
: matter how many times I change the cel format to "text" so that the zeros
: are
: not dropped, I find that as I go down the sheet, they are dropped and I
: have
: to re-format the cels to "text" and replace the zeros.
:
: How can I stop the program from dropping the initial zeros?
:
:
: