Excell issues

[outlaw02]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Power PC

ok i dont know wats going on. im creating a spreadsheet and one of the cells is suppose to have 16 characters of numbers in one of the cells. but once i type my 16 digit numbers ex(3253542522256) i input it as shown and once i move to the next cell in turns in to (6.58638E+13) and when i look at the formula bar the last number of what i initially inputed turns into a 0.. i tried changing the the format of the cells but nothing... im CONFUSED!!!! whats happening

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Power PC

ok i dont know wats going on. im creating a spreadsheet and one of the cells
is suppose to have 16 characters of numbers in one of the cells. but once i
type my 16 digit numbers ex(3253542522256) i input it as shown and once i
move to the next cell in turns in to (6.58638E+13) and when i look at the
formula bar the last number of what i initially inputed turns into a 0.. i
tried changing the the format of the cells but nothing... im CONFUSED!!!!
whats happening

What's happening is that you're running into XL's precision limit of 15
decimal digits. So the last digit gets truncated, and the display by
default will use scientific notation, i.e., 6E+13 represents 6 followed
by 13 zeros.

If you need more than 15 decimal digits of precision, you'll likely have
to use a different application.

If you're trying to enter credit card numbers, or something similar,
then preformat the cell as Text or prefix your entry with an apostrophe
('), so that XL will bypass the parser and treat the entry as ASCII text.