Turn off Scientific Notation in Excel
I Would Like to Prevent Excel Behavior That Any Large Number I Enter Is Stored as a Number, Then Abbreviated to Scientific Notation. Is It Possible to Tell...
I would like to prevent Excel behavior that any large number I enter is stored as a number, then abbreviated to scientific notation. Is it possible to tell Excel 2007 to stop doing this?
6 Answers
Unfortunately excel does not allow you to turn this functionality off by default.
However if you select your data, right click, and click "Format cells..." and choose Number you can stop excel from changing your data to scientific notation.
This is inconvenient (yet effective) hack. Note, this is only really useful if you need to import the full number into another application (like Access) or provide the proper display.
If you format the column in question as number, you can copy all correctly formatted numbers into Notepad. Then just create a new column formatted as text, and copy the Notepad representation into the new column.
Maybe scientific notation is one of the less useful Excel behaviour.
If you have a scientific notation in the A1 cell you cant just use this formula to have a text formatted value in the B1 cell:
=CONCATENATE(A1)
This is an example of the results:
+----+--------------------------+-------------------------+
| | A | B |
+----+--------------------------+-------------------------+
| 1 | Ugly scientific notation | Awesome numbers as text |
| 2 | 8,80001E+11 | 880001465055 |
| 3 | 8,80001E+11 | 880001445410 |
| 4 | 8,80001E+11 | 880001455678 |
| 5 | 8,80001E+11 | 880001441264 |
| 6 | 8,80001E+11 | 880001413012 |
| 7 | 8,80001E+11 | 880001391343 |
| 8 | 8,80001E+11 | 880001373652 |
| 9 | 8,80001E+11 | 880001273395 |
| 10 | 8,80001E+11 | 880001115228 |
| 11 | 8,80001E+11 | 880001185106 |
| 12 | 8,80001E+11 | 880001062936 |
| 13 | 8,80001E+11 | 880000796522 |
| 14 | 8,80001E+11 | 880000890200 |
| 15 | 8,80001E+11 | 880000596278 |
| 16 | 8,8E+11 | 880000243378 |
| 17 | 8,8E+11 | 880000069050 |
| 18 | 8,85101E+11 | 885100625390 |
+----+--------------------------+-------------------------+
If you want to make ALL numbers typed within a sheet NOT to appear in scientific format, you can consider creating a template & reusing it.
When you create the template, select the whole sheet and set the default number format for all cells to "Number".
One workaround I use when pasting in tab-delimited data that contains long numeric codes is to set the cell format before I paste the data.
If you're pasting into a blank sheet
- Select all (Ctrl+A).
- Format the cells as "text" (Ctrl+1 to bring up the format menu).
- Paste your data (Ctrl+V).
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