Number Problems

[Patrick]

I know for those that use excel all 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.

 

[Jim Thomlinson]

You won't have any luck dealing with it as a number as you are limited to 15
significant digits. After that it is rounded... Try this
1. Format the cell as Text
2. Paste the Number
3. When you paste you will get the small clip board in the bottom right of
that paste area. Choose Match Destination Formatting to avoid the implicit
conversion to a number.

 

[Dave Peterson]

format the cell as text, but paste the value into the formula bar.

 

[Greg Lovern]

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