Prevent Excel from Changing Strings to Numbers

Hello!

I frequently use a system which provides serial numbers in the form "246B135" or similar but whenever I open this information in an Excel document, the "clever" autoformatting changes all the numbers with an "E" such as "246E02" into an exponential such as "2.46*10^4".

If I format the column as text, it becomes "24600" rather than "246E02". I do not enter the numbers myself so I can't add a comma at the start and there are too many of them to change manually.

Does anyone know how I can tell Excel to just leave them alone - that I actually want them to read "246E02" rather than "24600"? They need to stay in this format as I import them to a database which uses this serial number as a key.

Many thanks!

format cells as text BEFORE entering data its to late to do it afterwards

Originally Posted by Ambulare

I do not enter the numbers myself

I'm afraid the data is exported from the source system as an Excel file - I can't change it.