Hi Beth:

Arvi's approach is very good. Another trick is to control things when the
data gets pulled in.

If possible, get the data as a text file with a .txt type rather than .csv
When you open a .txt file in Excel, the Import Wizard will be invoked. You
can tell the Wizard to treat that field as text.
--
Gary's Student


"BethP" wrote:

Thanks for the quick reply. It's so weird that I've never run in to this
before!

If you pull in a list of data with 16-digit numbers, and perform a cell
format to set it all to text, by default it converts to scientific formula.
Is there a way to keep this from happening without having to concatenate
every line with an apostrophe? (We occasionally pull 1000 row x 30 column
spreadsheets with this kind of data, and it's often by techs who are not all
that Excel savvy.)

Thanks again,
beth

"Gary''s Student" wrote:

Hi Beth:

This is not a new problem, it is an old limitation. Integer numbers can
have 15 digits. If you need more than 15, just precede the value by a single
quote (apostrophe) or format the cell as Text.
--
Gary's Student


"BethP" wrote:

We're seeing a problem in Excel that I've never come across. All of the
machines that we're seeing this on just downloaded this month's auto-update,
but I haven't looked yet to see if there were any Office fixes. I'm
wondering if any of you are seeing this or might have a solution for me.

We typically work with 16-digit credit card-style numbers, where the entire
number is treated as text. Typically, trying to format the number as text
results in scientific notation, so I usually leave it as a number with no
commas or decimals. However, no amount of formatting seems to affect this
issue.

When I enter a number in to a cell, if it is longer then 15 digits, any
number after 15 changes to a zero. You can see in the example I've pasted
below where I was typing in all 4's ending with a 3, from 2 digits to 17
digits long. Even if you go to edit the data, the last numbers have been
changed to a 0, it's not just how the formatting is showing the number.

43
443
4443
44443
444443
4444443
44444443
444444443
4444444443
44444444443
444444444443
4444444444443
44444444444443
444444444444443
4444444444444440
44444444444444400

Am I missing something? Help!

Thanks!!
beth