Ever been irritated by how Excel treats your phone numbers, credit card numbers, postal codes, ZIP codes, product codes, or account numbers?

There's one thing these all have in common: they 𝘮𝘢𝘺 start with 0.

By default, if you punch in any number beginning with 0, Excel automatically removes the 0 (or successive 0s) to convert the value to a proper number.

Sometimes, this is desirable, but all too often, it's not. Thankfully, Excel received an update a while ago to address this long-standing issue and put you in control.

To turn off this feature, do the following:

1️⃣ Go to File ＞ Options ＞ Data.
2️⃣ In the Automatic Data Conversion section, uncheck the 'Remove leading zeros and convert to a number' box.
3️⃣ Select OK.

Excel will now respect any 0-leading values you input and affix a preceding single quotation mark (') to signify text.

Do you find Excel's default behaviour for this useful or a sheer annoyance?

#exceleration #excel #globalexcelsummit

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