Thanks very much Pete and Mike for your responses. Both work perfectly!

"Pete_UK" wrote:

You could put this in an adjacent column:

=TEXT(A1,"00000000")

and copy down, assuming your numbers are in column A. This will
convert the numbers to text values, but would make them all 8 digits
in length with appropriate number of leading zeros. You could fix the
values and then copy these over the values in column A.

Hope this helps.

Pete

On Mar 26, 11:05 am, DianeG wrote:
Hi

A client of mine imports data into Excel 2003 from an external system. The
numbers vary in length when imported, never more than 6 characters long. The
client always need the numbers to be 8 characters, is there a way to add
zeros to the start of the number to make it 8 characters in length what ever
the original length was?

Thanks in advance

Diane