Excel 2007 : text to column wizard & brackets

**mahone** · 07-21-2012, 12:41 PM

\hi its been a while since I've asked for help in the forums, I'm either getting better or i've just been lucky with any problems.

I've a worksheet with over 250 rows of data (normally have about 3 or 4 of these a week to do) but one thing in particular is frustrating me

when using the text to column wizard I'm trying to split the following:

No: 10 (325904)

so that the number contained in the brackets is moved to the next column keeping the brackets, but when I split the data the () disappear & are replaced by -

i've tried replacing ( with |( which works but when i remove |( & replace with ( it once again becomes -

thanks in advance for all help

**MarvinP** · 07-21-2012, 01:01 PM

Hi mahone,

As you can see, Excel thinks (123) is a negative number. If you don't have any negative numbers inside those parins then create a new column and do an Abs() (absolute value) of all those numbers and the parins will go away. If you need to keep the Parins as text you can use something like:
If in A1 is -123, in B1 put this formula. =IF(A1<0, TEXT(ABS(A1),"(#.##)"),A1)