Dear MS-Excel Forums,



Please help me to solve this problem.

I had the text data in excel having around 1000 rows of number. Say for example bank account number.

Some of the number are starting with natural numbers, but many numbers are starting with zero's, it may be staring with one or many zeros.(Example 023829, 00382741,128407439)
If your number is start with zeros than top-left side of the cell is prompting you to convert the format of the cell as number. Accidently I converted as number and saved.

Now the problem, I want to get the numbers with zero's back. I would have tried by using functions, if I had my previous data of certain digits (say for example my previous data digits are fixed for 8 only) But this case my data contains different number digits.

Is there any way out to get the previous data back. Other side data which typed is manually, (let Microsoft can change the formatting which ever we opted. But should not allowed to change the base data which we typed-Hope this should be the basic principle)

Please let me know you have any way get back this data


Thanks & Regards,

Sunil Pinto.

There is one - restore your data from archive copy, in case you have one (or restore table in folder at some earlier date, in case there is this option for you)! Otherwise it is possible only when you must have have data of fixed length with leading zeroes - like you described in your post!

Thanks for your response,

My purpose is not served. But your appreciating your response.

Do you have any other datasets that have the correctly formatted numbers?

The best thing to do is to always format that column as text, but I've been in the same situation. We have project numbers that begin with four digits then a letter, to indicate which division they are attached to, and sometimes a subsequent digit if it's a supplemental project. But the 1234E2 can get converted to a scientific number if I'm not careful.

If you happen to have an association of certain account number formats with specific institution (for example, Bank A's numbers would begin with three zeros, Bank D's with two), you could sort or filter on the institution and apply the appropriate number formatting).