I just don't understand why, in some cases where the cell will be formatted as "General", Excel will drop the first number should it be "0", and in other cases where it won't drop the "0" even though the cell is formatted as "General".


Case in point. I entered the number "00029970" and the cell was formatted as "General" and it dropped the first 3 zeros. I entered another number "0001A67C" and no zeros were dropped and the cell was formatted as "General".
Does Excel look at the entire entry and because there is a letter after the "1", it treats the entry differently? The only way I have found to keep a leading "0" is to format the cell as "Text". The entries are actually serial numbers, and I have a lot of them, and excel is the best place to keep them because of the ability to find a specific number.

Spot on ! as soon as there is anything else than numbers in a string, XL treats it as text. ( without operator intervention text is always left aligned in the cell, numbers are right-aligned)

To keep leading zeros you can format the cell(s) as text (before entering data) or precede the string with an apostrophe (')

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