Topic: Microsoft Excell 2003

[pntalbot]

New to Excell could anybody please tell me, how you put in a Cell, a tele number 0870-- all I get is `870`. I`ve already tried--- Format/ Cell/Number and various Options

[philandjan]

From my experience, leading zeros are always cut off.

The way that I normally get round it is by defining the cells as being text. It just means that you can't use them in formulae.

[Barnowl]

Define the cell format as text.

If you subsequently want to treat it as a number you can use the Value() function to convert it into a number.

e.g where A3  is text  '004906783'     Value (A3) will give you the number 4906783

It gets much more complicated if you have hyphens and spaces in the telephone number, though actually can't think why you would want to treat one as an actual number anyway.....

[pntalbot]

Barnowl
The number 0870 is the start of a tele number, which surely can be Logged in Excel without hyphens etc

[Barnowl]

I think the point of the question was that if you do so without predefining the format of the cell you lose the leading zero?

[asbean]

I don't use Excel much, but from what I remember if you put an apostrophe first then the number it treats it as text.

[Eristic]

Phone numbers should always be entered as text. Phone numbers are numbers in name only, they look like numbers but you cannot perform meaningfull calculations on them. The number is really a unique id of a line connection and in the future could be upgraded to alphanumeric.