excel changes last character of data
 

hello all,

I work with .txt files that I bring into excel; the problem that I have is
that the last character in one of the data columns is changed when I paste it.
I have also tried to 'open' the texts files but excel does the same thing.

a sample cell of such column is this:
05062600001218818
when I pasted it into excel it is copied as 05062600001218810, the last 8 is
converted to 0!

it would be great to know how can I solve this.

Hi,

It looks as if you are running into the limits of accuracy of Excel's coding
of numbers. Have a look at http://www.cpearson.com/excel/rounding.htm (thanks
to Google for that!), which talks about this.

HTH,

David

"jrgarcia79" wrote:

hello all,

I work with .txt files that I bring into excel; the problem that I have is
that the last character in one of the data columns is changed when I paste it.
I have also tried to 'open' the texts files but excel does the same thing.

a sample cell of such column is this:
05062600001218818
when I pasted it into excel it is copied as 05062600001218810, the last 8 is
converted to 0!

it would be great to know how can I solve this.

Excel can keep track of 15 digits.

If you format the cell as Text, then paste, does it work ok for you?

jrgarcia79 wrote:

hello all,

I work with .txt files that I bring into excel; the problem that I have is
that the last character in one of the data columns is changed when I paste it.
I have also tried to 'open' the texts files but excel does the same thing.

a sample cell of such column is this:
05062600001218818
when I pasted it into excel it is copied as 05062600001218810, the last 8 is
converted to 0!

it would be great to know how can I solve this.

--

Dave Peterson