Displaying large numbers in a cell

[Christine]

In a worksheet that one of my co-workers uses, she needs
to input numbers that are up to 16 characters long.
However, Excel for some reason is changing the last number
entered to a 0. For example, if she entered
4223980067104216, Excel would change it to
4223980067104210. If she entered 4223980067104212, Exel
will change it to 4223980067104210. I have tried changing
the column widths, cell formatting, check the options
under Tools, but I am not able to find anything to keep
this from occuring.

I have noticed that Excel does not make this change if
only 15 numbers are entered into a specific cell. However,
if you enter 16, the last digit is changed to a zero. If
you enter 17, the last two are changed to zeros.

Any help on this topic, would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[John Wilson]

Christine,

Excel has a limit of 15 significant digits.
If you want to input credit card numbers, precede them with an
apostrophy and Excel will treat them as text and display all the digits.

John

 

[Greg Lovern]

Hi Christine,

Once the cells are formatted as text as already described and the
16-digit numbers have been entered as text, if you then want to do
mathematical calculations on the 16-digit numbers without Excel
truncating them back to 15 digits, you can do that with my Excel
add-in, xlPrecision.

You can download the free edition of xlPrecision here:

http://PrecisionCalc.com


Hope this helps,

Greg Lovern
http://PrecisionCalc.com
Get Your Numbers Right