Hi,



I consider myself to be an advanced user of Excel but I'm dumbfounded by a couple of simple questions in Excel 2010 running on Windows XP:

1 - I open Excel and in a new workbook type the value 1000000.1235 into a blank cell. Because of the default column width of 64 pixels, this displays in Excel as 1000000. If you then widen the column to 132 pixels, the number is displayed as 1000000.124

a) Why is Excel rounding the number to 3 decimals?
b) How can I change this to display 4 decimals for every new workbook? (nb: I know how to format a cell to show this, but I want the default to be 4).


2 - Double-click on a CSV file in Explorer that contains the below row:
A,B,C,D," 227,505,877.32 "

On my machine, Excel opens and column 5 displays as ######## until I double click the column width and then I see 227,505,877.32
On a colleagues machine in another country when they open the same file using the same version of Excel and same O/S, they see ######## until they double click & then they see 227,505,877.3

a) Why is this different for the same file on different machines?
b) How to I change colleagues machine to act the same as mine?

Many thanks!!!

Stu

Hi Stu
See the following link for your issue which should resolve both your issues:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/mso...our-needs/2672
For issue 2 it appears that your colleagues book.xlt may be set up differently.
Good luck.
Tony

Try File tab - Options - Advanced - Check " automatically insert a decimal point" - Value to 4

__________________
Did you know you can thank someone who helped you? Click on the tiny scale in the right upper hand corner of your helper's post

Thanks for replies so far - both are helpful but neither answer my questions.

1 - where do I specify that for new worksheets, the default number of decimals when entering a number is 4? Sure I can create an xlt and then format all cells as numeric with 4 dps. This is not what I want as day-to-day usage of Excel does not necessarily require all cells to be numeric (ie. I still want Excel to convert 4/4 to a date).

1a - the "auto insert decimals" does not appear to work unless I'm doing something really silly. The scenario I described still happens - ie. Excel still only shows 3 decimals.

2 - neither my colleague or I are using any XLTs - neither of us have any files with .XLT extensions on our machines/network drives.

Please try both scenarios on your own versions of Excel and let me know if I'm missing something fundamental.

Cheers

Stu