15 digits

L

lorrdon

Want to enter a 16 digit number in a column. When I do that and click"
return " the cell I want the number in shows the first 6 digits of the
number, with a decimal point after the first number and the phrase " E
+15 " ( without quotation marks ) after the last digit shown.
How can I get the full 16 digits to be displayed ?
 
J

JE McGimpsey

lorrdon said:
Want to enter a 16 digit number in a column. When I do that and click"
return " the cell I want the number in shows the first 6 digits of the
number, with a decimal point after the first number and the phrase " E
+15 " ( without quotation marks ) after the last digit shown.
How can I get the full 16 digits to be displayed ?
Click to expand...

XL's double precision floating point math (like almost every other
spreadsheet) limits values to about 15 decimal digits, so you can't
actually enter a 16 digit number and retain the last digit. What you're
seeing is the number converted to scientific notation.

Assuming you're actually trying to enter a credit card number, or
something similar, where you're not going to do any calculations with
it, you can either (a) preformat the cell as Text, or (b) start the
number with an apostrophe (') to indicate that the value is Text and not
to be parsed.
 
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