Gav may be misleading you. Numbers in Excel can be stored to a precision of
15 digits. If you want more digits than that you'll need to store it as
text, either by formatting the cell as text before you enter the number, or
by preceding the number by an apostrophe.

If it is stored as text you won't be able to do arithmetic on it directly,
but if you desparately need to do so you can use LEFT/ MID/ RIGHT to split
up the text string and then do the arithmetic manipulation on the separate
chunks. It is, however, unlikely that more than 15 digits would be
significant arithmetically, so longer strings tend to be identification
numbers (such as credit card numbers).

The bar to which you refer is known as the "formula bar".
--
David Biddulph

"Gav123" wrote in message
...
Hi,

Are your Cells formatted as Number?

You can check this by Selecting FormatCellsNumber, then select Number
form
the list.

Hope this helps,

Gav.
"jkf" wrote:

any help on this would be appreciated , i am trying to insert a 20 digit
number into a work sheet, but it does not appear as i want it

example: 74540182653438069674 is what i want but what appears is
7.45402E+19



also in the bar under the tools (sorry not sure what it is called) the
number there changes to 74540182653438000000

thanks in advance for any help

JKF