Hi Charlene (Scharlene ?),

You will have to use a format other than General
You could format them as TEXT since it sounds like they are identification and
not really treated as numbers. Pasting from plain text is not a problem but
pasting from a Rich Text source or from Excel will probably change the formatting,
unless you paste as values...
But if the are whole numbers up to 15 digits without leading zeros you could
use # as your fomat.
---
HTH,
David McRitchie, Microsoft MVP - Excel [site changed Nov. 2001]
My Excel Pages: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/excel.htm
Search Page: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/search.htm

"scharlene" wrote in message ...
i have a column of numbers that I am pasting into a worksheet and they are 13
digits. i just need they listed as they are no funtion to
them(mathematical). how do i format that column so that the number appears.
i see it in the preview above when i highlight on it. but when it is in the
cell it has the + sign