At 13:16 -0700 3/31/08, Bruce Barrett wrote:
>I'm not the original poster, but I can tell you that Excel
>will quite willingly save something other than what it loaded.
>
>If you load: 00123456
>Excel will likely save it as:  123456
>
>Fine for $s, I suppose, but for things like part numbers it is
>a disaster.

And 001234560012345600123456 -> 1234560012345600000000. It's all about IEEE 
floating point.

The solution to that is a filter that replaces strings of digits starting with 
a 0 with the string preceded by a single quote mark.  Excel treats things that 
start with a quote as TEXT.

There are similar problems with date and time that Excel will convert into days 
and fractions thereof unless you add a leading quote.

Actually you can add spaces to numbers with the same effect but that can be 
confusing later.

-- 

--> From the U S of A, the only socialist country that refuses to admit it. <--

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