[NFBCS] Converting Formulas to Numbers in Excel

[Steve Jacobson]

Leslie,

I hope I don't go into this more than is helpful.  First, when you say that the numbers are being downloaded as formulas, do you mean that they look like this:
9.52E+09
This is scientific notation rather than a formula, but I have seen large numbers displayed in this form if the cell width isn't large enough to display the whole number.

While a phone number is a number, one rarely would want to do arithmetic on it.  Even though displaying it as a number with zero decimals may work, having a phone number treated as a number can create other issues.  You may find, for example, that commas are inserted as thousands separators.  If your column happens to get too narrow,it will revert to scientific notation rather than simply be truncated.  A truncated number would tell you immediately what saw happening.  In the case of data that is numeric and has leading zeros, those zeros will get dropped.  This won't normally happen with a phone number, unless the international calling codes are included.  This is problematic, though, with zip codes where New England zip codes start with zeros.  Most of this is avoided if you choose the "text" format.

There are other formats that you can check out.  For example, just below the "text" option is a "special" option.  This format has options specifically for zip codes, phone numbers, and Social Security number.  If you pick the phone number option, the area code is automatically displayed within parentheses and there is a hyphen between the phone exchange and the final four numbers such as (123)456-7890.

The final format option is a "Custom" format which lets you define exactly how you want the number to look.  If you type the string ###-###-#### as your custom format, the phone number is displayed as 123-456-7890.

This isn't meant to be complete coverage, but maybe this will give you some ideas of how to get the results that you want.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

-----Original Message-----
From: NFBCS <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Leslie Fairall via NFBCS
Sent: Sunday, November 17, 2024 4:40 PM
To: Bradford Snyder via NFBCS <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Leslie Fairall <fairall at shellworld.net>
Subject: Re: [NFBCS] Converting Formulas to Numbers in Excel

Thanks to everyone who responded to my post regarding converting formulas
to numbers in Excel. I was able to do this by using control-1 where the
number tab was the default. I changed the category to number and decimal
places to zero. This resulted in numbers as digits. I now have two
follow-up questions:

1. Is there a way to covert to phone Numbers?
2. How can I figure out why these results are downloading as formulas
instead of numbers? These documents are .csv files.



--
Leslie Fairall
mailto:fairall at shellworld.net

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