Hello,

why excell need to intervene in what i write in the cell?
i what to write 050 and it change it to 50

i need to write 050!


how can i insert what i want in cells without excel think it knows what i mean??

i dont want excel EVER change my text into his formatting.
i choose TEXT formatting but then i get a notification i entered wrong formatting text.

thanks for your help

Hi,

Excel is a spreadsheet and is designed to work with numbers. Its built-in behaviour to interpret your entry this way is something we all just have to live with. To retain the leading zero, you can either format the cell as text before entering the number, or you can preceed the number with an apostrophe, eg '050

If you don't want to see the green triangle warning that the number is formatted as text then you can disable it in the options. I prefer to keep the warning because some worksheet functions will ignore the data (because they are designed to ignore text).

__________________
Colin

RAD Excel Blog

Actually, you can format the cell as a number, and still keep the leading 0. Custom format the cell with "000", this way, 50 will be displayed as 050, and 9 will be displayed as 009. Or, custom format with "0########", with as many "#" you need, and you will have only one zero before your number. (as long as the number of characters of the number is smaller than the number of characters in the custom format)

thank you both on your replay.

i tried what Catalin suggested and it works for me just fine.

so, cheers Catalin.

Glad it worked for you.
You can mark your thread as solved, then... (under Thread Tools, on top of this page)
Cheers, Catalin