Hi Bryan,

Unless fractions are what you work with pretty much all the time (ie not other number formats), prefixing them with the ' if you don't need to do calculations, or with = if you do need to do calculations is probably the safest course. With the latter, you can alway change the cell formatting if you need to, but the underlying data are preserved as you've input them. If you format the cells beforehand as 'fraction' and simply input the fractional value, Excel converts your input to a decimal value and merely displays it as a fraction - the actual value input is lost.

If you really wanted to, you could format an empty workbook in the 'fraction' format as Excel's default templates for both workbooks (Book.xlt) and worksheets (Sheet.xlt) and place them in Excel's start-up folder. That way, Excel will default to that format for new workbooks. The downside is that you'd then have to change the format for all the cells containing numbers that you want displayed as decimals - and Excel will still hold the underlying values for fractions in decimal form.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]