Hi Patrick,

It sounds like you might be pasting after copying from a formatted
(not plain text) source, such as an email message or a Word document,
or some other program that is not plain text.

When you do that, Excel changes the number formatting of the target
cell to General. Then, Excel recognizes your data as a number, and
truncates the precision to 15 significant digits.

To avoid that, you can paste into the formula bar, as Dave suggested,
or paste into Notepad (or any other plain text program), then copy
from Notepad and then paste into Excel.


If you want to do math on those large numbers without losing precision
(without the numbers being truncated to 15 significant digits), see:

http://precisioncalc.com/xlprecision.html


Good luck with your project!


Greg Lovern
http://precisioncalc.com


On May 29, 9:00 am, Patrick wrote:
I know for those that useexcelall the time this will be a simple question.

I am trying to paste a series of numbers into a spreadsheet the first of
which is
242818203000009150
when I paste it into the cell it shows as
2.42818E+17
and shows the value of the cell to be
242818203000009000

I have formated the cells for text, but ultimately I can't get it display as
the original number or to stop rounding.