Excel — Display long number or one with a leading zero
Have a number in Excel that just won’t display correctly? Try these tricks to reveal the entire number, even the leading zero.
Select your number or range of numbers missing the leading zero
On Home tab click on the drop-down menu in the Number section and Choose “ab Text”
Or RIGHT CLICK after selecting your data and choose FORMAT. In the Format window, choose TEXT and click OK.
The green cell below has been formatted to be TEXT. You may get the little green triangle in the corner alerting you that you have a number stored as text. This can be ignored.
Another method to display a leading zero, is to add a single apostrophe (‘) before the numbers.
Got a long number?
What tricks are there to keep Excel from shortening long numbers into Scientific numbers? Typing a long number often results in Excel automatically converting to scientific format. It’s been a minute since I’ve needed this format, I just want to see the full number.
Switching the Number dropdown to Number will display full number with 2 decimals.
To remove the decimals or otherwise customize try the RIGHT CLICK > FORMAT for options.
