If you format as text, it will be text. Left aligned is text
don't know what you mean by
"but still see themselves as numbers"

If you bring it in as text you can use datatext to columns and select
text as column data format in step 3


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Regards,

Peo Sjoblom


"Shirley Munro" wrote in
message ...

We have part numbers some of which are a mixture of text and numbers and
some that are numbers only. Excel sees those parts consisting of only
numbers as numbers rather than text. Even if I format the column to
text, the numbers simply move to the left hand side but still see
themselves as numbers. I know I can precede a numeric value with an
apostrophe to make Excel see the cell contents as text however this is
time consuming. Once I have formatted the column to text, I can then
double click on each cell containing only numbers and it will then see
itself as text but again this is time consuming. In other instances
and particularly when bring the data into Excel from another source,
Excel converts long part number to exponents which is no use at all as
I can end up with duplicate parts - part no 234567112244 with show up
as 2.34567E+11 and so does part no 234567112245 where the last digit is
the only difference. Any suggestions.


--
Shirley Munro
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